


The Shunning House

by Guede



Series: Of Werewolves and Tentacles [5]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Melissa McCall, Belly Rubs, Cthulhu Mythos, Dom/sub Undertones, Established Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, F/M, Fingerfucking, Handcuffs, Haunted Houses, Humor, Incest, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Massage, Miscommunication, Pack Bonding, Pack Cuddles, Polyamory, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Werewolf Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-09
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-15 22:13:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9259676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Only one thing stands between Peter and his happily-ever-after with Stiles: Stiles’ possessed house.  Located in Arkham, Massachusetts, just off the Miskatonic University campus.In unrelated news, Stiles’ father goes on a business trip to Beacon Hills, California, to deal with a little Cthulhu clean-up.1/19/2017:“Okay, I’ll stop blaming you for the slap method of stopping a hallucination, clearly that’s a general family problem,” Stiles is muttering. He pauses, seeing how Derek’s tensed up, and then stops where he is, sitting on Peter’s nearer leg. Then he holds up his hands with the palms out. “So, idea. How about I rub your belly and get you relaxed, and when you’re drifting off, I promise I’ll jump back over so if you start thrashing around, worst you’ll do is knock me out of bed.”Notes: Plot-wise, you can probably read this without having read the prior stories, but the worldbuilding set-up is in those.  You only need a passing familiarity with the Cthulhu Mythos to follow along.





	1. Chapter 1

Frankly, Peter never actually meant to stay at Stiles’ apartment in Arkham, just like he never meant to flirt with the man past wheedling out just _where_ Stiles was getting his Cthulhic knowledge from. Or chasing Stiles down through yet another insecure sociopath’s rampage through Beacon Hills, or following him through half a dozen more eldritch horrors and subsequent rescues of complete and utter strangers, or meeting Stiles’ father and surviving his on-the-spot psych evaluation and then, with real sincerity, thanking him for his approval.

Or, well, curling up around Stiles after several rounds of excellent sex and a meandering yet genuinely engaging discussion about historical interventions by Nyarlathotep in werewolf wars, a comfortable grip on Stiles’ buttocks, Stiles nodding off against his shoulder, thinking that the window sightlines really aren’t ideal but Peter can probably blackmail enough high-end security cameras out of the Argents to make it work…and realizing that he’s in well into the throes of constructing a two-year plan for renovating the place into a proper den and _den_. He’s thinking about _denning_. In a hotel that charges for wifi and thinks those terrible little one-cup pods of freeze-dried coffee constitute acceptable brew. 

So when Stiles’ landlord sends a reminder that the lease will be expiring soon and if Stiles isn’t planning on renewing it, he’ll have to pack his things and get a certificate of exorcism and set a move-out date, Peter can do one of two things. He can stop his slow slide into irrational sentimentality, disentangle himself from the man and escape before he’s irrevocably compromised. He hasn’t even scratched the surface of the potential resources that Stiles’ Miskatonic connections bring, but he doesn’t _need_ those. They’d be nice, but Peter’s hardly someone who will sacrifice his independence for _nice_.

He could do that. He does think about it while he’s out getting coffee. And then Peter goes back to the hotel and tells Stiles of course he’ll come help pack up things.

Next, Peter calls Laura to make sure that the route to Arkham won’t take him through any problematic pack territories. After that, he calls Melissa to see whether her son has made any new enemies lately. He calls Chris Argent and suffers the man’s surliness so he can cross-check his own read of supernatural politics on the East Coast. He even calls his nephew Derek, who’s back in New York, and forewarns him so Derek won’t throw a fit about Peter “sneaking up” via being within a few hundred miles of him.

Peter’s irretrievably lost his mind. Very well, if that’s the case, then he’s not going to waste any time fighting it. Everything he’s ever done, he’s always done it wholeheartedly, with no regrets, and this isn’t any different.

Still, it’s never part of the plan to actually _live_ in the house with Stiles.

* * *

“Yep, this is where I’ve made my humble home for the past three years,” Stiles says, opening the front door. He steps inside, grabs a mutilated tennis racket off the wall, and absently swats some sort of deformed, chittering, vaguely human-headed rodent away from their feet. “I know it looks really gruesome, but it’s huge, isn’t it? Not bad for student housing?”

Peter steps warily into the narrow, badly-lit entryway, doing his best to ignore what he’s smelling. He’s been in far more than his share of suspicious locations, but he has to admit this stands up to any one of them. “Or for ritual murder, I suppose.”

“Hey, hey, now. School’s out, there’ll be none of that when we can’t get into the university’s composting facility,” Stiles says, with a cheerfulness that rings a little false. So does the faux-conspiratorial look he throws over one shoulder as he leads them down the short hall to his unit. He smells nervous, with a faint sting of anger beneath, and when he unlocks his door, he does it with a stiff set to his shoulders. “Well, anyway, I just need to get my stuff packed up and then figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, so it’s not like you’ve got to put up with it for that long. You don’t even need to stay at night.”

“No, I don’t, that’s true. On the other hand, I can’t help but be a little concerned for your bodily integrity here,” Peter says. He follows Stiles over the threshold, but keeps one ear listening for the patter of tiny feet. Then, just as they skitter towards the door, he drops his bag, uses the momentum to pivot, and boots the revolting thing over the staircase railing. “Of course that’s probably over-possessive of me, but I have a deep appreciation of said body in its current state.”

“Which is what, completely virginal, untouched, unsullied before you got your groping werewolf hands on it?” Stiles snorts. The anger is seeping out of his scent, and when he comes back over to help Peter with the bag, he’s visibly more relaxed. “Come on, Peter. I lived here for three years and nothing touched me at night except what I called up, naked and covered with blood, while fingering myself and looking at my math books that were lonely, misunderstood, _virginal_ me’s only consolation—”

“You,” Peter says, not quite keeping the hungry roll out of his voice. They’ve only been together a couple months but Stiles is a damnably quick learner when it comes to Peter’s vices, and he might appreciate that even more than the body that’s pressing unnecessarily close to pull the door shut. “You are presenting an _excellent_ case for hiring professional movers and booking an extended stay in that charming three-star place downtown.”

Rolling his eyes, Stiles throws out a half-hearted elbow to block Peter from grabbing his waist, and then grabs Peter’s arm with his free hand. Presumably for balance, although he seems quite solidly planted when Peter finesses a pivot in the tight space and steps in behind him, nosing up into his hairline, hands dropped to his hips. Stiles snorts again, but his body is leaning back into Peter.

“That charming three-star hotel has been on my dad’s blacklist for two years running because they’ve got this one turn in the hall where it looks like you’re going to the ice machine, but instead you end up falling into the subbasement,” Stiles says. He grabs at Peter’s right hand, stopping it from where it’s sliding around to his zipper, and then uses it to turn them into the wall. His shoulder pins Peter in the chest while he cranes around and bites sharply at Peter’s jaw. “Look, you pissed off Brown Jenkin.”

Peter would much rather investigate that faint but deliciously salt-scented patch behind Stiles’ ear, but Stiles bites him again, so he sighs and peers out into the hall. That thing is crouching on the railing, scowling like Derek when he has to lend out his car, and when it realizes it’s got Peter’s attention, it raises one tiny, handlike forepaw and shakes it, a paroxysm of rage making it quiver all over.

“Oh, have I,” Peter says, letting his fangs drop and his eyes glow. “And is that a lease violation?”

“Well, not specifically, but depending on how grumpy he gets, my landlord might call it a breach of the historical preservation clause,” Stiles says. Turning into Peter, not towards the ridiculous little demonic entity, his hand sliding off Peter’s wrist and onto Peter’s belly. “I know, right, you’d think but the city council passes the stupidest ordinances.”

Brown Jenkin stops squeaking at the sight of Peter’s fangs. Its beady eyes narrow and it runs up the railing a few feet, till it’s out of lunging range, and then it stops to contemplate the situation. Peter probably can’t do it permanent injury, but he’s not the kind of idiot who mistakes that for not being able to inflict _any_ kind of injury, and if it’s old enough for historical preservation status, it’s old enough to understand that.

“So we’ll promise to restore any damage,” Peter murmurs. His sigh creeps up on him, rippling up with the fingers Stiles is sneaking under his shirt and up over his belly, and once it’s out, he lets his head drop to Stiles’ shoulder. Laps at that spot behind Stiles’ ear, and much to his delight, confirms that it _is_ a trace of last night the man missed with his shower. “That’s always very interesting, isn’t it? Reconstruction?”

“You just want to see me mess around with architecture again, like you don’t know how much shit my dad gives me over that,” Stiles says, with a little slap to Peter’s stomach. He’s not only expecting Peter to shiver at it, he takes advantage of Peter’s distraction to turn further, letting go of the door knob so that he can push both hands up under Peter’s shirt. “Okay, so also, Brown Jenkin’s not bad at keeping out all the other pest life around here, and considering there are a grand total of three pest-control companies in the whole _country_ who’ll work here and their wait-lists are insane, that’s not something to ignore.”

Peter would try to be serious about this discussion, but Stiles keeps scratching at his abs ever-so-lightly, just enough to send wonderful little sparks of heat over Peter’s skin. “Mmm, yes, well, mature werewolf scent usually keeps off the rats too, and so the insulation’s bad? Another reason to keep close to you at night, wouldn’t do for you to catch cold.”

“In summer,” Stiles says skeptically, while his hands stroke a slowly building heat in Peter. “New England actually does have that, in case you didn’t notice. So what, you’re gonna park in my Victorian murder house and keep me company? No fancy hotel?”

As invested as Peter is in ensuring the discussion continues to move in an, ah, southward direction, he doesn’t miss the close way Stiles is watching him. He doesn’t make a fuss out of spotting it, just leans over and rests his mouth at the edge of Stiles’ lips. “Well, a few nights won’t hurt, would they?” he says. “True, it’s not my usual style, but I think I can manage.”

“Manage, he says,” Stiles snorts, his breath puffing into Peter’s mouth. His hands trailing hot teases around Peter’s bellybutton, and then down the inside vee formed by Peter’s hipbones. “Which is code for we’re gonna have sex on every non-cursed surface, so you can make it up to me for the lack of gourmet coffee and the semi-human voyeurs—”

“Really, Stiles, you talk like you didn’t see the concrete pit my nephew calls a loft, which I’ve had to resort to more than once,” Peter says. “This won’t be _that_ much of a hardship.”

Stiles’ fingers tighten a little bit on Peter, and not in an arousing way. “Yeah?” he says.

Peter smiles, and kisses him, and for the next thirty minutes…well, hardship or not, Peter very much does enjoy the benefits of not having to cross town to enjoy Stiles’ company. And the carpet’s in good shape, well-padded and less prone to friction burns than the usual, even if the underlying floorboards tend to bulge up in inconvenient places. And after all, getting his brains fucked out amid heavy wood paneling, with old-fashioned, stern-faced angels in the cornices futilely attempting to transpose their Puritan morality over the centuries…Peter can see a bit of offbeat charm in flagrantly, enthusiastically defying that.

“Mailman,” Stiles mumbles, lying on top of Peter as footsteps walk up the front porch. He lifts himself a few inches, makes a displeased noise, and then plops back onto Peter, nestling his cheek down on Peter’s shoulderblade as he recurls his hands around Peter’s biceps. “Ugh. I can just feel the fellowship packets, like little ghouls, just waiting for somebody to pull them out into the light so they can go off murdering.”

Peter checks Stiles’ heartbeat before he responds, but the other man is still relaxed enough that Peter assumes that is, in fact, intended to be mere metaphor. “You still have a month, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, but I really shouldn’t push it. I mean, if I’m going to take something nearby, I probably should just renew the lease here, and my landlord’s not going to give me that much more time,” Stiles says. He sighs and nibbles at Peter’s nape, and when Peter rolls up into it, grabs Peter’s hips and pins them and does that wonderfully obscene flex with his cock in Peter. “But I don’t know, do I really want to stay nearby? On the other hand, that’s where the money is, and my tuition waiver doesn’t cover grad school…”

“Your father did say he’d help out, and of course I’ll still be covering my own expenses, no worry there,” Peter says. He’s half-alert in spite of his reawakening arousal; they’ve had something like this conversation a few times, usually late at night, but so far Stiles hasn’t seemed too anxious to come to a decision and Peter hasn’t seen any reason to nudge that along. 

Now, however, Stiles has a restless tone to his voice that catches Peter’s ear. “Yeah. Yeah, I remember, and thanks,” he says, a bit flatly. He pushes his hips up against Peter’s buttocks again, but it’s lacking something in motivation, and then he slumps into Peter’s back. “These should be the last round of packets, anyway, so I can get on comparing them and all. And I guess I should. You know. Decide.”

Part of why Peter hasn’t hurried the man is that his mind might be made up, but he’s well aware that Stiles is not a werewolf, and for non-werewolves asking for a commitment after two months is not normal. He is confident that Stiles likes him too, and isn’t about to lose interest in the near future, but as for more than that…Peter can wait. Like any good predator, he knows better than to leap before he’s sure of success, and he _will_ be successful at this. At Stiles.

“It’s always good to have all the relevant information at hand,” Peter finally says, in as neutral a tone as he can muster. He also arches himself, pushing back into Stiles’ cock, just on the off-chance that the man would appreciate a change of subject…and from the way Stiles chuckles and presses his mouth back against Peter’s nape, Stiles does appreciate that.

Stiles appreciates it, and he’s kneading his hands over Peter’s shoulders, deep firm grooves with his fingers that send the muscles rippling far down Peter’s back, while inside Peter his cock moves again, rubbing across Peter’s prostate with just the right amount of—

There’s a horrendous banging on the door. Yelping, Stiles starts up, then catches himself on Peter, his cock suddenly and unpleasantly absent from Peter’s hole. He seems to realize that and gives Peter’s ass an apologetic pat as he turns. “What the hell—”

“Stiles!” shouts a woman. “Stiles Stilinski! You open this door this instant, you miserable lying worm, or so help me, I’ll show you how to matrix somebody into Nyarlathotep’s realm—”

“Oh, shit,” Stiles says, jumping off Peter. He scrambles around for his clothes, takes one step towards the door, and then scurries back to grab Peter, now halfway to sitting and very displeased about it, by the shoulders. “Okay. So, listen, I know this sounds exactly like a terrible ex-girlfriend moment, but it’s not, I swear.”

Peter’s a little busy wishing death to the woman pounding on the door. “Yes, obviously, Miss Martin’s not remotely your type.”

Stiles stares at him. “Wait. What. Wait. Lyds—you know Lydia.”

“Yes, of course I do, and you…well, you know her now, but you never met her before?” Peter says, frowning. “But Scott knows her.”

“ _What_ ,” Stiles says.

* * *

Lydia Martin hasn’t changed in the least in the four years since Peter last saw her. She’s just as well-dressed and well-coiffed, and just as revolted by the very idea of breathing in the same air as Peter. “Let me get this straight,” she says, using the least amount of her bottom necessary to perch on Stiles’ sofa. “In two years of joint research, five pending joint patent applications, thousands of dollars of ruined shoes and an _ungodly_ number of federal investigations, it never occurred to you to tell me you’re originally from Beacon Hills?”

“Well, one, that’s what the joint venture rules _say_ , okay, we don’t ask why MIT wants people trained to not algorithm themselves into a shoggoth pit, and you don’t hack our real identities,” Stiles says. He slaps down two mugs of tea, then hands Peter his cup of coffee with a little less irritation. “Two, why would I? I mean, _you_ never told me you’re actually the same redheaded girl who showed me up in math back in grade school.”

“Because I didn’t know you were the same brat who did his damnedest to kill us with his science-fair volcano with real sulfur dioxide fumes,” Lydia snaps.

Peter takes a seat with Stiles, on the armchair across from Lydia. Neither of them move to touch their tea, he notes. “How on earth did you forget about him?”

Lydia flicks him an irritated look. Then takes a second, longer, less dismissive but no less contemptuous look. “At that age all men think they’re right. He hardly was anything special, aside from the sheer scope of the property damage. Also, his ears were different.”

Stiles makes a face and shoves his hands under his thighs. His shoulders still twitch up and in towards his ears. “Yeah, well, puberty and hanging out with the decontam team at Miskatonic when they’re pranking each other with mutagens, and okay, we’re both from Beacon Hills. So?”

“So?” Lydia appears to be genuinely flabbergasted by his reaction. Her brows rise and her eyes widen, and her mouth hangs open for a good second. Then she gives herself a shake, and her back stiffens in either a belated recoil or the beginnings of an outraged rant. “ _So_? So that town is a supernatural death trap, and I’m a banshee and I’m supposed to be able to _predict_ that kind of thing. That’s why I made sure to get out when my parents divorced, and now you’re telling me that you went back there.”

“Well, yeah,” Stiles says. He pulls one hand up and starts to reach for his phone, then moves it away from his pocket. Then he glances at Peter. His mouth twitches and after a second, he puts his hand back down. On Peter’s knee. “I mean, sure, we had a Cthulhic infestation, but that’s Tuesday here, and anyway, once we got it cleared up, it didn’t seem like that bad a town.”

This time Lydia doesn’t gape at him, but she does do her damnedest to subject his skepticism to a laser glare. When that doesn’t strip him down, she snorts and turns to Peter. “And you, of all people, are going to let that stand?”

“Oh, I’m not going to impose my experiences on Stiles,” Peter says, almost rolling his eyes at how obvious her divide-and-conquer attempt is. He has to amend his opinion of her—her manipulative skills do appear to have deteriorated. “He knows my opinion of the place, and he also knows that my family is mostly responsible for shaping it. You can hardly generalize that sort of thing.”

“Look, just because I went back doesn’t mean anybody’s making you do that, unless I’m missing something,” Stiles says. “I mean, what, do I have Beacon Hills cooties or something?”

“You,” Lydia says again. Then she stops herself. She takes a deep breath, while her nails sink so deeply into the purse she’s clutching that they score through the leather patina. “Again, let me get this straight. You went back there. You made friends with Scott again. You’re _dating_ Peter Hale. And you—you—you _actually_ think that that’s better than answering my emails and telling me whether we’re going ahead on that grant?”

Stiles blinks rapidly. Then he pulls out his phone and starts swiping at it. Lydia’s eyes drop to the phone and she heaves out a breath that bears a remarkable resemblance to the snort of an angry bull—and she is a banshee, after all. So Peter doesn’t think it’s getting too much ahead of himself to set down his coffee cup and reposition his arms so that he can muffle Stiles’ ears as necessary.

“Do. _Not_. Tell me. You set me as spam,” Lydia says in cold, crisp tones.

“No, of course not, frenemies don’t do that to each other, spam’s for straight-up nuisances,” Stiles mutters. “I got them, I just…yeah, right, so on Miskatonic’s end, that’s kind of dependent on this fellowship that I’m not sure I want to take, and Lyds, I know you’re not going to believe me, but I’m not specifically trying to screw _you_ over, I just don’t know—”

Lydia jerks up off the sofa and slaps her purse under her arm. “You _shit_ ,” she says. She turns to Peter. “And you.”

“Yes?” Peter says with a smile. “You?”

She quivers a little in sheer rage, and then gives up on whatever she’d been about to say and just storms out of the apartment. Stiles gets halfway out of his seat, then drops back with a not-quite-relieved huff.

“Okay, then,” he says. He rubs at the side of his head, then shrugs weakly. “Okay. Well. So that’s…that’s Lyds, of course, you already knew her.”

“I knew her in Beacon Hills,” Peter says dryly. The door is still open, because Lydia hadn’t even stopped to slam it, and since he doesn’t want to deal with that Brown Jenkin creature, he gets up and goes over to close it. “She wasn’t particularly friendly then, but we did keep getting in the way of her little romances, since McCall would insist on making sure they didn’t kill her.”

Stiles lets out an awkward, short laugh, and then shuffles his feet. “Um, so I don’t know your history, so Lydia and I are actually…she’s usually not that upset at me, and we have done a lot of work together, and I, well, I respect her. She’s not a legacy either, so she doesn’t put up with that bullshit.”

Peter pauses with his hand on the doorknob. All his amusement aside, a part of him is coldly, quietly enraged that Lydia would talk to Stiles like that, and it has nothing to do with anything rational. It’s just this is the man he wants to set up a den with and if Stiles has managed to earn that sort of respect from him, he will not have that crossed. 

On the other hand, much as Stiles turns it into a joke—or into glorious mayhem, depending on his mood—the idiotic prejudices of the Miskatonic student body have gotten their hooks into him in way that makes Peter even more likely to go on a murderous rampage. It’s so…so understandable, Peter thinks. Predictable, petty. _Common_ , in spite of the perpetrators’ supposed fine pedigrees. Very similar to werewolf politics, in fact, and God knows Peter’s had his fill of people telling him what his family’s made him over the years.

“Well, I can’t say I’ll be _pleasant_ to her,” Peter says, turning back towards Stiles. “But in that case, I’ll be civ—”

For a second, while the door’s still settling in its frame, Peter just stares. He’s not quite sure what happened, but suddenly he’s standing in the hall. And just the second before, he was in Stiles’ apartment, on the other side of the door he’d…he had pulled it _towards_ him, and yet, somehow, here he is on the other side of it.

It opens again while he’s still too bemused to do anything, and Stiles looks out at him with a worried expression. “Peter?”

“I was trying to shut it,” Peter says, pointing at the door.

“Yeah, I saw, and then…um, well, you want to come back in?” Stiles says.

Nervous again, and when Peter doesn’t hesitate to step forward, Stiles breaks into such a relieved smile that Peter stops again. Inside the apartment.

“I think it might’ve been a geometric warp,” Stiles says. He’s kept firm hold of the knob, and once Peter’s inside, he holds onto it for a few seconds after he’s shut the door. He uses his free hand to feel around the frame, and then to take out his phone and look up something. “I thought I’d gotten all of those, after three years…but that’s an old house in Arkham for you, misbehaving angles bouncing you the wrong way.”

“Pity we couldn’t use it on her,” Peter says.

Stiles laughs again, a little more freely, and then lets go of the door and puts his arm around Peter’s waist instead. “I was kind of ignoring her, I think once I answer a couple emails, she’ll chill out,” he says. He glances behind them at the door, then pushes them back towards the kitchen. “Well, I’ll check that after dinner, make sure it doesn’t do that to you again. Anyway, let me show you around.”

“Oh, yes, do,” Peter says, bending to nuzzle at Stiles’ temple. “We have so many more surfaces to introduce me to.”

“You are so—so damn greedy,” Stiles says, giving Peter a little, completely ineffectual push on the hip. “I mean, what if I don’t want to screw on something? I might not be virginal but some of the furniture is, and poor things, we’re not even bothering with informed consent, we’re just tossing them straight into the deviant end.”

“Really, Stiles. Eldritch geometry is one thing, but sentient furnishings are a stretch, even for this town,” Peter says, nibbling at Stiles’ cheekbone.

They both chuckle, and…then Peter gets bounced out of the bedroom. The bathroom. The _kitchen_ , even though the house has been updated to have an open-floor flow from there to the living room, so it’s not even a proper doorway, but a cabinet door Peter is opening to get some glasses for them.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on,” a flustered Stiles says, letting Peter back into the apartment for the sixth time. “I’ll fix it. This stupid house—I’m going to give Dad a report when he gets back in town and he’ll rake the landlord over for whatever the hell he did, because he definitely didn’t file the permits for it, I’d know and anyway. I’ll fix it. And—and, well, if you want to get a hotel in the meantime—”

That would be logical. And yet Peter’s first instinct is to seize Stiles by the wrist, and when the other man turns to him in surprise, he has to fight his urge to crouch and growl, and generally act like a complete animal. Which he is not. If he thinks something needs to be done, he can think through it and make a plan. Even if it’s for an utterly illogical impulse, he _will_ be competent about it.

“No,” he tells Stiles. “It’s just a house, Stiles. And if we have to constantly hold hands to make sure I don’t leave, well, I’m prepared to make that sacrifice.”

Stiles looks at him, and in that second before the ridiculousness of it gets the better of the man, Stiles’ expression is so surprised, in such a pleased way, that Peter knows logic wasn’t the correct guide here. “Yeah,” Stiles says, grinning. “Such a sacrifice, needing to touch me at all times.”

“Whatever I have to do to stay put,” Peter says, and he means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I get asked from time to time why I structure stories a certain way, even though I don't think I get that experimental (and though I haven't read it myself, I understand _House of Leaves_ proves you can verge into genres like horror and still play around like "literary" authors). The short answer always is: because this is how I think the story should be read. It's like those restaurants where they tell you to pour the sauce on first and eat that part first. It might not be to your taste, but when I write a story, I'm not just getting down the narrative, I'm thinking about how all the component parts, characterization and plot and dramatic emphasis, fit together, and I want a structure that will best serve the particular story I'm writing. I also don't want to write what's essentially the same damn story over and over again, just with the characters moved around--I get bored that way.
> 
> So this one's not built the same as the other installments. It's from different character POVs and what served Stiles' voice doesn't work for Peter's and John's, them both being much more reflective and less impulsive. Also, the action in the other stories involved a mobile target so there was a lot of frantic running around to convey, whereas here, we're talking about stationary ones.
> 
> The story overall is messing around with Lovecraft's _The Shunned House_ , but the teleportation and Brown Jenkin are from _Dreams in the Witch-House_.
> 
> Ghouls in the Cthulhu mythos are a race of doglike humanoids who have aspects of evil fairies (changelings, stealing people to integrate into their culture) and who live largely underground.
> 
> You didn't really think I was going to leave out Lydia, did you?


	2. Chapter 2

When his kid tells him that, come to think of it, vacation is fun and Stiles wants to take some more time off before coming back to Arkham, John says sure. Stiles has worked hard these past four years and put up with more bullshit than any kid should, with less people giving him credit for it than there should be, and John’s happy to see him getting out there in the world and spending some time with people who do like him.

So yeah, it gives John a little bit of pause when Stiles says that also, instead of flying home, he wants to do his cross-country road-trip with a werewolf named Peter Hale. He pulls up the guy’s classified record, makes a couple calls, and then, while he’s out overseeing the Beacon Hills clean-up, puts the fear of having the keys to all Miskatonic’s restricted-access areas into Peter. Also into Peter’s niece and alpha, even if watching them makes John suspect that’s just a nominal title where Peter’s concerned.

But generally John does trust his son’s judgment in people, and Stiles is a college graduate and at some point, if you’re a good parent, you have to step back and just let your kid go. It puts a lump in his throat and a couple white hairs on his head, but he sucks it up, says see you in a few to his son, and then heads back to his life at Miskatonic, wrangling professors and students who seem to think mass-insanity-inducing extradimensional entities are fun theoretical test subjects. He doesn’t expect in the least to be making a second trip to Beacon Hills ahead of Stiles, but, he supposes, that’s life.

“Yeah, that’s Cthulhic contamination, all right,” he says, as Melissa livestreams video of the spot where the Nemeton used to be onto his phone.

The spot’s still pretty bare, but dead center is a small sapling. With tentacles. They’re thin, short things that almost look like pine needles, except for the fact that the actual leaves are broad deciduous blades. And that every time something touches them, like, say, somebody poking a stick at them, they try to wrap around it and drag it towards the gaping, semi-slimy, fishlike mouth that opens up near the roots.

 _“I thought so,”_ comes Deaton’s voice. _“We had some leftover materials so I’ve already started setting up containment measures, but I thought I’d get confirmation and your input before we started uprooting it.”_

“Yeah, I’ll put you in touch with a botany professor here, he’ll want the sample…were you trying to replant the Nemeton?” John asks.

He’s trying to not sound too accusing, and he must come off pretty well since Deaton chuckles. _“No, as a matter of fact, I was regularly checking it to make sure nothing accidentally or intentionally planted itself, but this one somehow sprang up overnight.”_

 _“We have surveillance video,”_ Melissa breaks in. _“It wasn’t human intervention, we don’t think…a squirrel buried the acorn. Though when I showed the video to the werewolves, they thought it looked off. The squirrel.”_

“You catch the squirrel?” John says, halfway through an email to that professor.

Melissa sighs. _“No, but we’ve got people combing the woods looking for anything wrong with the wildlife, but…this is a park, John. Unless we build a dome over it, there’s only so much we can do.”_

 _“And at risk of sounding selfish, we do need to replace the Nemeton sometime soon,”_ Deaton says. _“I had a spot marked out elsewhere in the preserve, but I haven’t had any luck with my cultivars, and I can’t help but think it’s related.”_

John sits back in his seat and thinks that over. Then he minimizes the email and pulls up a fresh one to send to the travel department. “Well, look, I wouldn’t get too worried yet, but it does sound like we’d better do the place over again.”

 _“I had a feeling you’d say that,”_ Melissa says, sounding relieved and frustrated at the same time. Then the feed jiggles and her voice fades; she’s handed the phone over to Deaton and has stepped off to call to…Chris Argent, that’s his name, looking up from where he’d been sticking rune-rods into the ground around the sapling. _“It’s going to be tricky with people starting to come back from summer, but I think we can pull off something about having a team here for survival training. Chris, you don’t have any actual bookings, do you?”_

“Oh, wait, hang on,” John says. He sets his phone up against the edge of his computer monitor so he can fill in the travel request form. “I don’t think it makes sense for my whole team to come out again. I’m going to need all your documentation so far—”

 _“Scott and Allison are putting together a package,”_ Deaton chirps.

“—but just from here, this one looks a little weird. I think it’s better if just I go out, and I do some field testing, and once we have a better idea, I can pull out people from San Francisco,” John finishes. And sends off that request form, and then starts a new email to his assistant to start implementing his out-of-office protocol. “Classes start later here, so I’ve got some time before it gets busy again, and I think that’ll attract less attention.”

 _“Oh.”_ Melissa comes back into view, one arm crossed over her chest, the other propped against it so she can finger her lip. She thinks it over, and then, surprisingly, smiles in approval. _“You know, I think that sounds great. I do want to get it right this time, and besides, you didn’t get much of a vacation the last time you were out here.”_

“Ah, well, I never get vacations, I’m used to it,” John shrugs.

 _“That is a real shame, you know.”_ The connection blips a little, making Melissa sound oddly…contemplative. But then it straightens out and she’s her usual brisk self. _“All right, shoot me over the itinerary, and we’ll get on setting you up here. Thanks, John. We’re looking forward to seeing you.”_

“Yep, same,” John says, and then ends the call because of course Travel’s zinged back an immediate, frantic reply about him leaving and does he know he needs regent approval and a zillion other red-tape issues.

And normally they are such a hassle that he doesn’t feel like fighting through them, but he’s not sure what it is about today. Maybe it’s the paperwork, maybe it’s his son wandering around the country, causing trouble with his boyfriend and making John feel old, or maybe it’s just that that tentacle tree is just plain _weird_ , and it’s been a while since John’s seen something that made him think that, and not just sigh in disgust. But John just isn’t going to have the fussing.

He’s going to Beacon Hills, and that’s that.

* * *

As it turns out, he nearly misses Stiles’ return to Arkham in the process, which almost makes him change his mind. But when he meets Stiles for lunch before heading off to the airport, his kid looks so happy and relaxed that he thinks sticking around longer would just get in the way of that. And he knows that for sure when Stiles pokes too hard at what’s up in Beacon Hills now and John asks after those fellowships to fend him off, and Stiles immediately tries to hide behind his phone.

Not that, John thinks as he walks out of the airport to see a similar expression on Laura Hale’s face, he needed that disapproving glower from Peter. “Something wrong?”

Laura’s come with Chris and Scott to pick him up, and when he asks, she turns so that he can see the headphone wires her hair had been hiding. “No, I’m just reminding my pack that you don’t keep people out of the preserve by making up stories about radioactive spills mutating the plants into vigilantes,” she says, before going right back to yelling at somebody over the phone.

“I think we’ve got it under control, it’s just Erica jumped into my call with Stiles and she got kind of carried away with something he told her about secret comicbook messages to the Cthulhu faithful,” Scott says, with a sheepish shrug. Then he reaches an offering hand towards John’s bag. “Can I get that? How was your flight? Are you hungry or anything? Mom sent a cooler of food and there are water bottles in the car.”

John’s not normally somebody for cosseting, but Melissa McCall had been such a fantastic cook that Claudia had sometimes fantasized about them wooing her away from her asshole husband, and her food’s only gotten better over the years. And airplane food, even on the private charters John takes because of the kind of stuff he has in his checked bags…he keeps hold of his luggage, but takes the cooler.

“Flight was same old, same old,” he does say, after the fifth time Scott asks. “Good weather out, anyway, no delays.”

“Okay, great,” Scott says, bent over his phone in shotgun. Then he looks up as if John’s caught Stiles abusing him for fingerprinting practice. “I was just texting Stiles and Mom that you’d touched down fine. Sorry, he asked.”

“No, that’s all right, saves me the trouble,” John mumbles around the most delicious pulled pork sandwich on earth. “And just so you know, you don’t have to send him anything about the climate, or recent earthquake activity, or any bullshit about nutritional analysis of my food.”

From the stricken look on Scott’s face, he’s already spent way too much time skulking around on Stiles’ behalf. Scott was always a great kid, and he still is, but he makes John feel guilty as hell with how damn _cheerful_ he is about putting up with Stiles’ demands.

“I think your mom already held those up at the hospital,” Chris interrupts.

“Oh. Oh, really? Okay. I’ll just…I’ll let her know, too, so they don’t keep bugging her for updates,” Scott says, clearly relieved. He seems to sense something off John, because he gives John a quick, reassuring smile before turning back to his phone. “Sorry, I hope it wasn’t a big deal or anything, we were just checking if you had any dietary restrictions. Stiles mentioned the stuff about octopi—”

“For the record, that’s just the students, the staff don’t have any issues with it. Believe me, I like a good grilled tentacle,” John mutters. Then he digs into the cooler, finds the baggie of cookies he suspected Melissa would have in there, and stuffs it into his pocket while he can. “Anyway, nope, as far as food’s concerned I’ve got no problems. Well, maybe a coffee addiction, but that’s par for the course when you work in the ivory tower.”

Scott nods attentively over his phone. From the little bit of the screen that John can see, John thinks he might have switched from texting to taking notes.

“I don’t think keeping you supplied with coffee’s going to be too much of a problem,” Chris says. He’s speaking a little more loudly than he needs to be, in that tone every parent recognizes, when you’re trying to hint to your kid that they need to stop being embarrassing. “Speaking of, did you want to get anything before we headed over to the clinic? Do you need to set up something?”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Scott at least knows to take an out when he sees one. He’s not any good at unobviously stuffing his phone back into his pocket, but then, John frequently regrets teaching Stiles that one. “So I think we said today wouldn’t work, but Alan moved some appointments around and we can sneak you in.”

“Well, I’d like to drop off my bags, and I have a couple things that should go in the fridge, but other than that, no time like the present,” John says. He swigs some water to clear the pork from his mouth, while up front Scott and Laura start discussing the best way to reroute the car. “Nosy owners?”

Both Laura and Scott twitch a little. “What?” Laura says.

John hides a grimace behind his water bottle. If he’s honest, another reason why he doesn’t travel too much is because every time he does, he realizes just how much he’s turned into the Miskatonic people it’s his job to protect. No idea of normal social practices and the kind of lousy humor that thinks adding reanimation to mix ‘n match cadavers is great Friday night entertainment.

“Why we have to sneak into a vet clinic,” he clarifies. “Does the local gossip bring in her Chihuahua, or something like that? Because I could borrow a dog from somebody in San Francisco if it’d help.”

“Oh, got it,” Laura says. Then she shakes her head. “No, it’s not like that. People mostly mind their business around here, and pretend like they don’t see all the stuff that goes on. Which I guess works for them, right up till Melissa gets a body in the morgue again—”

Scott’s starting to look a little horrified at her, when he isn’t darting panicked glances at John. He clears his throat, but Chris gets in first. “We’re just running interference with the sheriff on a couple things right now, and he’s the kind where it’s more important to him that he looks like he’s in charge than that he actually is helping. He hassled us some after your team left, and we…may have not told him you’re in town again.”

“Huh,” John says. He didn’t have to deal with the sheriff at all the last time—Melissa took care of all of that—but a couple of the San Francisco people had let drop some uncomplimentary mutters. “Sorry to hear that. If you’d mentioned…well, now that you have, I do still have time to see if I can pull any strings up at the state level.”

“No, that’s all right, we don’t want to put you through that trouble,” Chris says, shaking his head. “You’re just here to do some analysis, and it’s not like we keep him informed on that sort of thing anyway. I’m sorry if this seems kind of cheesy, but we just figured it’d be less work for everybody if we just kept this lowkey.”

John laughs and helps himself to some pickles from the cooler. “You’re the local point, I’m gonna assume you’re the expert there. I guess you should just know I didn’t bring my fake IDs with me.”

“That comes up, we’ll handle it,” Chris says, and then he turns the discussion back to the fastest way to get into Beacon Hills. 

Settles it in about two seconds, which, since it’s his house that John will be staying at, John isn’t sure why Laura and Scott were so intent on squabbling over it anyway. He guesses it’s some sort of werewolf politics issue; Stiles was trying to explain that to him, but Stiles is still working on teaching that to himself, and at that stage, much as John loves his son, he just can’t follow all those footnotes and nested hypotheticals. Once Stiles gets that all straightened out to the point that he can whip up a nice, short, layman’s abstract, John will take it up with him again. In the meantime, John’s found that supernatural communities can usually be handled the same as local politicians—find somebody who knows how to talk to them and just make sure the interpreter isn’t screwing him over.

John was thinking that Scott would fill that role—Melissa obviously could do it, but she’s too busy to be chaperoning John around town all the time—but Scott excuses himself once they’ve made the pitstop at Chris’ house and then arrived at the clinic. “Sorry, but I’m patrol lead this week,” he says. “But if you need anything, I think you still have my cell and I’ve always got that. Or you can text Allison and she’ll know how to get me—you have Allison’s number, right?”

“I’ve got everybody’s number that Melissa gave me last time,” John says. He also has everybody’s number from their classified records, but he doesn’t think now’s the time to let them in on that. “No, it’s fine, go handle your business. The whole point was to keep this trip from blowing up into a circus like last time.”

“As circuses go, it was pretty tame for this town,” Laura says once Scott’s left. She’s finally wrapped up with her pack and has relaxed a lot. They haven’t interacted that much—Melissa ran interference for that, too—but from what John’s seen, and the bit he’s heard from Peter via Stiles, Laura’s not a bad person, or alpha, just one who bit off way too many teenagers than she could handle at first. She still has a bit of a harried air, like she’s always one step from defending herself. “On the other hand, if this is turning into a regular thing, my pack and I need to know that. We’ve got enough people challenging us for territory without adding tentacle monsters to that.”

Deaton pauses in the middle of laying out samples of the preserve’s soil to wince and then shoot her a cautioning look. Chris also doesn’t look too happy with her, and he changes his posture somehow—he’s off to the side and John is still mostly looking at the samples, so John doesn’t get a good look—which prompts Laura to make a face at him, then roll her eyes.

“Well, I don’t think we actually have Cthulhic incursions,” John says before it can get petty. “If that was it, we’d be picking it up in San Francisco. I think this is just residue from the last incursion, and if I’m right, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to clean it up.”

To her credit, Laura doesn’t actually come off like she’s losing her temper. She’s just skeptical, and that’s probably a healthy attitude for somebody in her position to take. “Because last time definitely didn’t work,” she observes. “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but why was that? I thought you were experts.”

“They certainly have far more experience than the druids do, with things of this nature,” Deaton breaks in, with a worried glance at John.

“Alan, I know, okay? And I’m happy to have the help,” Laura says. Now she’s starting to get snappy, though she takes a breath before turning back to John. “I’m just asking, why is it so complicated? I want to know what I’m dealing with, that’s all. If this is one of those Beacon Hill specials that defies all laws and is the exception to the rule and all that, fine, but I hate it when people try and hide the ball.”

“Yeah, I get that, and I’m not a big fan of pretending things are better than they are either,” John says in as soothing a tone as he can manage. “But I don’t know enough to give you a fair assessment yet. If I tried, I’d just be a liar. So I can’t tell you how bad this is, but here’s what I don’t think it is: I don’t think it’s the actual Great Old Ones themselves. I don’t think we have active Cthulhic worshippers running around, though there’s always the chance they’ll sense what’s going on and come by themselves. I don’t think we’re too far along either, and that always makes it easier.”

Laura considers him for a few seconds. Young as she is, she does have an impressive stare, flat and penetrating, and enhanced by how abnormally still she’s holding. It’s that otherworldliness that makes it eerie, like she’s watching him on levels he can’t even sense—just the same as the Deep Ones, come to think of it. Just take off the gills and other fishy parts.

“Okay,” she finally says. “That’s starting to make sense.”

“Well, I’m glad, because I also think part of the problem has to do with your local conditions, and there I’m going to need you people to pitch in,” John says.

Chris raises his hand. “You’re talking about the Nemeton?”

“Yeah, that. We did try to account for that the first time around, the best we could, but we went through our records, and I’ve been going through them again, but this might just be the first time that a Nemeton and a Great Old One have ever tangled,” John says.

Strangely enough, the other three all relax. It’s kind of an exasperated relaxation, but still, they seem a lot more comfortable. “I knew it,” Laura says. “Beacon Hills strikes again. All right, then, so where do we start?”

* * *

Deaton sent over the preliminary tests he’s done and John’s gone over them, but Deaton’s not an expert in that kind of testing, bright a man as he seems. They’ve also taken more samples since then, and John wants to cut down on any variation in testing conditions, so he gets them going on running the same tests on all the current samples. 

Somehow, the next time John looks up, two hours have gone by and Melissa is standing in front of him, sipping from a cup of coffee and smiling wryly. “Normally I’d apologize for interrupting, but Deaton’s starting to ask whether he should break out the cots,” she says. “What, no jet lag?”

“Yeah, well, the nice thing about recalibrating your geospatial sense to deal with Cthulhic dimensions is it takes care of that, too,” he says, stepping away from the counter. They hug and then, as he backs off, a flurry of cramps zip up and down his spine. He grimaces and puts his hand back to try and rub them out, and then looks at the softly glowing rack of test tubes. “This the dinner call?”

Melissa snorts. “John, everybody broke out for pizza a good hour ago. I don’t know how you don’t smell the garlic, Laura ordered the Vamp Special from Marion’s and it reeks to high heaven.”

Now that she mentions it…John kneads his back some more and tries to not look like a mad scientist type. Because really, he isn’t. Miskatonic keeps him around for his ability to get people _out_ of labs. “Well, that cooler you sent along took care of me for the day, I think,” he says. “No harm done if I’ve got to skip the garlic pizza.”

“All right, well, I’m glad I can keep ignoring your son’s texts about your eating habits,” Melissa says dryly. Then she glances past him at the tubes. “Is this a good time to break?”

“Something up?” John says. He checks that all the chalk lines are straight and unbroken, and the timer’s set, and then gestures for her to lead him out of the room. “It can go overnight now, I just need to leave the good doctor a couple instructions. But most of my things are at—”

“Oh, we probably should head there anyway, get you to a shower and to bed after your flight,” Melissa says. She sounds and moves like she’s not in a hurry, and then puts her hand on John’s shoulder to slow him down, too. “Nothing has come up, I just figured I’d come say hi, see how you were settling in. And I have a few things I need to go over with Chris, but that’s local stuff, not this.”

That sounds good to John, and after they’ve made their farewells to Deaton and Laura, he hops back into Chris’ car with Melissa. He’s prepared to bury himself in his inbox and let them handle their business, but none of that must be urgent because they seem to want to talk about the kids.

“Scott’s so excited about flying out to Arkham, every time I turn around he’s reading one of those manuals that Stiles mailed him, or double-checking that his flight hasn’t been rescheduled,” Melissa says. She pulls her phone out of her purse and passes it back to John so he can see a photo of Scott’s head barely rising above one of Stiles’ distinctive 3D flowcharts. “And he’s already making plans for when Stiles comes to see him again. He hasn’t even started vet school and he’s already trying to reserve time in their specimen archive.”

“Allison’s pretty interested too,” Chris says, pulling up at a red light. “I think I caught her with a curriculum the other day, and I’d thought she’d dropped the whole idea of grad school.”

John looks sharply at the other man, but just then the light changes and Chris turns his head with the car. And then they’re arriving at Chris’ house, and Melissa excuses herself and Chris to the home office to deal with some paperwork.

Neither of them act anything but friendly and normal around John, and Chris even mentions that there’s beer in the fridge if John wants to unwind. So it certainly looks like they don’t mind the idea of their children developing more connections to Miskatonic, and John should probably just take that and be grateful. Get his shower and stop smelling so much like stale airplane.

He does lay out his clothes and start the water running, but then he can’t help himself and texts Stiles. Two seconds later, as he’s dropping his pants, his phone rings. “Son, when I say no rush, I mean think it over, do a little research, sleep on it and then get back to me,” John says upon picking it up.

 _“Yeah, well, Dad, maybe try that one when you aren’t double-checking the occupation of the guy whose house you’re staying out,”_ Stiles snipes back. He sounds like he’s at home, at least. _“So what’s the matter? Scott said Chris should be really happy to have you around, and Allison’s definitely thrilled that her dad isn’t just trying to bust through it on the strength of his stone face. Is he getting territorial or something? Demanding proof of concept? Asking about your casualty rates?”_

“No, he’s fine, hasn’t growled at me once. I was just checking,” John says. “Also, I’m about to get in the shower, Stiles, so maybe we should…why are you messing with handcuffs?”

 _“What? No, I’m not. I’m, um, I’m clicking my pen. Yeah.”_ Stiles coughs awkwardly. _“Why do you need to check that Chris is still an active hunter?”_

John presses his hand over his eyes. “You are at home, right? And Peter’s—”

 _“Oh, don’t worry, Peter’s right here. Say hi to Dad!”_ Stiles moves the phone and Peter’s amused ‘hello’ comes over clearly enough, no muffling like his mouth is full or suspicious slurring. _“He’s not going anyw—one of my bookshelves fell and he’s helping me screw it back onto the wall. That’s probably what you’re hearing.”_

“Right. On top of the clicking pen,” John mutters. He rubs at his eyes, then takes away his hand and notices that the mirror is fogging up—because the water’s running, and he probably shouldn’t be inflating Chris’ water bill. “Look, I don’t want to know what you two are doing. I’m just going to remind you that the ER is there for a reason, those people are fully up on supernatural creatures, and you do _not_ have a medical degree, whatever books you’ve read. And about Chris, I just…forgot what’s his cover for a second.”

 _“Wilderness survival training and extreme teamwork exercises,”_ Stiles promptly reports. _“Also, yep, still a hunter, still super-interested in—hey, is that it? He getting too friendly, like trade secret stealing friendly?”_

“No. And do not look up whatever it is you’re thinking of, Chris is—he just mentioned Scott and Allison visiting you later this fall, and I remembered I need to set up info sessions for them and wasn’t sure what level they’d need, that’s all,” John says. He kicks off his pants and underwear, and then swings one leg into the shower so that water’s doing something.

 _“Oh, I already got that started, don’t worry about it. I mean, of course the paperwork’s eventually going to route to you, per protocol, so you can amend my request as necessary, but I’m gonna take care of them,”_ Stiles says. That clicking sound starts up again and Stiles makes an alarmed noise, then tries to cover it up with a laugh. _“Well, uh, guess that’s good night?”_

“Yeah. ‘Night, kid. Don’t get into—” John waits for the dial tone after his son hangs up. Then he sighs, sticks his phone on the counter, and gets into the shower.

When he comes back downstairs, Chris is in the kitchen and in the middle of chopping up a garden’s worth of vegetables. “Melissa went on home, Allison’s staying over at her place tonight,” he says, before nodding at the fridge. “Lager or bitter, or orange juice if you don’t want booze.”

“Thanks,” John says. He opens the fridge and goes for the bitter, nodding approvingly at the label—an adjustment he didn’t have to make between northern California and New England was access to excellent craft breweries—and then holds out one for Chris, who nods. Then he pops the lids for the both of them. “So it wasn’t too much trouble, what you two had?”

He regrets the way he phrases that, too nosy, but Chris just takes the beer and, if anything, looks concerned that _he_ might have spooked John. “I don’t know if Stiles said anything, I know he was interested,” Chris says. Slowly, giving John time for a reaction if John feels like having one. “Last week we had to evict a succubus, but not before she wrecked a couple marriages. Which shouldn’t be Melissa’s or my business, but somehow this line of work always ends up having you hold a lot of hands.”

John snorts and then raises his bottle to the other man. “I hear you. University’s got a great mental fitness program in place, but my team still ends up with a lot of overflow. You’d think people seeing that, they’d be warned off trying anything themselves, but everybody always thinks they’re going to dodge the bullet.”

A thin but sympathetic smile ghosts across Chris’ face. He finishes up the carrot he’d been slicing and then tilts the cutting board to sweep the pieces into a plastic container with onion and celery. “We’d be dealing with this kind of stuff no matter who’s in town, that’s just life here. I think I might’ve given you the wrong impression earlier, talking about the sheriff, but we really don’t want you to think you’re imposing.”

“Well, if that were it, I figured Melissa would’ve already told me and run me out of town,” John says. Then he thinks that maybe Chris wouldn’t know about that and starts to explain. “When she first called me, it was right after Stiles rooted out those cultists in—”

“Yeah, I got filled in. She feels a little bad about that, actually,” Chris says. Once the container’s full, he puts the lid on, sticks a label on it and writes the date on the label, and then pushes it aside for some radishes.

“What, pushing back on me? I get it. If it was a battle for me with my associate’s degree to get a bunch of professors to listen to me, I’m sure it was a war for her,” John shrugs. “Besides, I probably deserved…when my kid’s involved, I can come off a little strong.”

Chris smiles sympathetically again. He’s still in the jeans he had on earlier, but he’s ditched the work-coat and without that he looks…not skinny, he’s got muscle in his arms, but he’s got a little less physical presence. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a little unusual. It’s just so casual for a hunter, that and him standing in bare feet dicing vegetables with a plain old kitchen knife, not a big showy custom-threat blade. Most of the professional hunters John’s met couldn’t turn off their need to intimidate if you knocked them out.

“He seems all right,” Chris says, nudging away the radish tops. “Allison likes him. Not just because Scott does either, which, if you know those two, means a lot.”

“He’s a good kid, and he’s done amazing things and he’s going to keep doing them,” John says. Smiles into his beer for a second, just before he puts his bottle up to his temple to ward off the migraine. “But proud as I am of him, I know my kid, and there’s no way he hasn’t gotten on your nerves.”

Chris glances up at him. It’s mild, not too slow or too fast, and if you weren’t looking closely, you might miss the keenness of it. The guy doesn’t put on an act because he knows he doesn’t need it, John thinks. 

“Well, I’ll admit, it’s not too easy learning that hundreds of years of knowledge your family’s paid blood for is completely useless,” he says, thoughtful, as he’s slicing off radish tops. “But look, at the end of the day, whatever saves lives. And honestly, I’ve run up against people who worked on my nerves worse. I’m not going to pretend I know your son that well, but at least to me, it just seemed like he was worried nobody would listen to him. Once you got past that, I think we got on fine.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” John says. He fiddles with his bottle, then drinks some more beer out of a lack of anything insightful to add onto that.

“I think it’s good for Allison to talk to people who work outside of the family traditions, too,” Chris goes on. He’s a little less certain of this part—of how John’s going to take it. Watches John more than the radishes. “Hunters can get so damn insular, like holding to the rules is better than doing the right thing, and…you don’t need to hear the whole Argent family history, but I’ll just say we split off a long time ago, and while I do think it was right for us, Allison’s been pretty lonely most of her life. She doesn’t have a lot of people she can talk to about what we do, let alone somebody who can understand it as well as Stiles does.”

“Is that why she’s looking at Miskatonic?” John asks.

Chris drops the radishes into the trash and then steps back to take his first sip of his beer. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand, then gives John a curious look over the bottle. “Probably a little bit. You seemed kind of uncomfortable back in the car when we brought it up.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I…well, look, I can’t tell you what to do with your kid, and obviously Stiles went there and came out fine,” John rattles on, caught off-guard by how matter-of-factly Chris just…stops beating around the bush about it. “I’ve worked there for almost ten years now, and there aren’t many places where you’ll learn more about the supernatural.”

Then he stops himself with another swig of beer before he can get too silly. He doesn’t even hope that Chris is buying it, but the man gives him a couple seconds to compose himself. In the meantime, three more radishes get diced and boxed up.

“Allison and I are in and out so much these days that when I get a second, I freeze up a bunch of stuff so whichever of us makes it home first doesn’t have to worry about opening up the fridge and having it be empty,” Chris says suddenly. He looks a little embarrassed about the vegetables. “I did want to give her a choice to not have to be in this—to just be normal, but she made up her mind she wanted to help people. And that’s great, but sometimes I worry she’s going to get too dedicated—even Scott’s trying for a vet degree, so he’s got a job besides rescuing everybody. She promised she’d finish college, but after that, she wanted to dive straight into hunting with me.”

“I’m having that talk with Stiles right now. Well, not about hunting, we’re not that. And…okay, to be honest, we’re not talking so much as driving each other crazy, and anyway, what I’m trying to say…I’m happy to talk to you about Miskatonic,” John says, sighing. He rubs at his temple again. “ I can put you in touch with people over there who’ll give you the warts and all view, but the place hits everybody different, and I think what Stiles and I feel about it might give you guys ideas about it that wouldn’t be true for you.”

“I don’t want to put you out,” Chris says immediately. He’s concerned enough that he stops chopping and lays the knife down on the board. “I’m not asking for any favors, I just—I’m rusty with my small talk, I guess. We are glad to have you back, and I was just…we don’t have something like how to bamboozle five hundred witnesses to talk about.”

With that he lets out a short, rueful laugh, and then he and John end up sucking their beers at the same time to cover up the awkward silence. Though what Chris has to be awkward about, John doesn’t know—he’s just been trying to be a good host, and John’s just been letting his paranoia trip that up at every turn. God, but it’s been too long since John’s tried having a non-business conversation.

“I keep telling people I’d like a few days where the only monster I see is some cheesy Syfy flick, and then I can’t stop veering back to trade talk,” John finally says, shaking his head.

Chris blinks, then grins. “Well, if _that_ would make you feel at home, I think I can dig up something from my Netflix queue.”

“You’re a monster movie guy?” John says, raising his brows.

“It depends, but sometimes it’s kind of therapeutic to come home and put on something where you don’t have to worry about saving everyone, even the idiots,” Chris says, with a little wry twist to his mouth. Then he looks down at his countertop full of vegetables. “I was actually thinking of one for tonight—I don’t have to go out again, and the pack’s been marathoning _Creature from the Black Lagoon_ movies, I need to keep up on the in-jokes anyway.”

“You know, the Deep Ones use those to teach their young ones how to manipulate people’s beliefs,” John says.

Chris frowns for a moment. “Because…we love tragic figures and that helps them hide what they’re really up to?”

“Pretty much.” John contemplates his beer, and then decides that watching a movie doesn’t sound like a bad way to practice his social skills. “I actually haven’t seen those in a while, why not…you need any help with these?”

“No, I can just finish up later, or maybe in the morning,” Chris says. He’s already halfway to the sink with the cutting board and the knife, and once those have been deposited, he comes back and grabs an armful of Tupperware, and then opens his freezer to reveal it’s nearly full with more of the same. “I think my stock’s all right anyway. I’m just kind of paranoid about supplies.”

“Here, here,” John says, lifting his beer, and Chris laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there isn't a story about Cthulhu sending subliminal messages through comic books and gobbling up attendee minds at Comic-Con, there should be.
> 
> Deep Ones are from Lovecraft's _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_. The reanimation joke references his _Herbert West: Reanimator_.
> 
> Chris runs something similar to _Tough Mudder_ here. Which isn't a bad cover for always getting caught beating up people and typing them up, if you think about it.


	3. Chapter 3

“Your father can instantly identify the sound of you playing with handcuffs,” Peter observes, as Stiles wiggles over and bats at the bedside lamp. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Stiles?”

“How about you tell me first why you’ve got spells for werewolf-proofing chains memorized?” Stiles grunts. The lamp’s one of those old-fashioned types with a rotating switch that ratchets through different degrees of lighting, and at full stretch he can just twist at it.

“Well, obviously, to help train new-bitten betas and secure the odd violent omega.” Peter watches the man struggle for a second, then sighs and worms out of his cozy blanket cocoon, draping himself over their pillows and giving Stiles those extra few inches. “I’m not going to be so tasteless as to fly into a jealous rage over a past you’ve clearly chosen not to stay with. Actually, I think a fuller knowledge of your skills and experience might turn out to be mutually beneficial.”

Stiles finally gets the light off, then drops to slap his free arm against the table with a sigh of relief. He rests there for a second, then starts crawling back over Peter. “Haha, I saw that compliment to yourself there, you know. And if you’re trying to say, hey, let’s handcuff me to the bed instead of to each other, I am definitely for that. But maybe after we get some sleep?”

He says, interrupted by two yawns, and finishing up with an absentminded snuggle into Peter’s chest. When Stiles is very tired, he has a habit of planting himself on the first surface that lets him go horizontal, locking his arms and legs around it, and then dropping immediately into a deep, nearly impenetrable slumber.

So he misses Peter’s reply, but to be honest, it wasn’t terribly witty anyway. They’ve spent half the night trying to make sure that Peter doesn’t end up in the hall any time he goes through a doorway, and the only sure solution they’ve found is to have Stiles with him, and preferably touching him. Even the promise of expanded sexual horizons can’t make Peter feel any less frustrated.

Although, he thinks, nesting his head against the crook of Stiles’ neck, it’s just one night, and he’s been handcuffed to far less pleasant company.

That’s when the little skittering noises start up behind the wall.

They sound like rats, but Peter doesn’t smell any or hear any heartbeats. At first, he tries to ignore them, but they have an uncanny way of tapering off just long enough for him to drop his guard, and then starting up again so loudly that he could swear they’re about to run right over him and Stiles. He does everything he can think of, right down to baby tactics like listening to his own heartbeat, but the damn noises just do not _stop_.

After two hours of sleeplessness, Peter gets out of the bed, picks up a still sound-asleep Stiles, and moves to the living room couch. He’s wary enough to not bother with the hassle of trying to pull out the rollout mattress while carrying Stiles over his shoulder, and just sits down and waits to see if…yes, the skittering has come with him. So he takes one of the sofa cushions and relocates to the kitchen.

The bathroom. The room of odd positioning and inconveniently middling size, between a proper room and a generous closet, that Stiles uses as his library. The tiny entryway. Everywhere that Peter tries, he still hears that damn noise. He hits the wall a few times, and loses his temper enough to growl so loudly that Stiles snuffles into his shoulder, but it continues on and on and on, and finally, catching himself before he storms out to sleep in the _car_ , for God’s sake, Peter returns to the bedroom. He is very, very tired, and very, very unhappy, and he is going to sit here till he figures out how best to work murder into the solution for that.

When his phone rings, Peter’s almost grateful for the change of pace. “Yes?”

 _“…Peter?”_ Derek says uncertainly. _“Something happen?”_

With the swiftness of the extremely sleep-deprived, Peter’s gratitude flips to aggravation. “Derek, you called _me_. I assume you had a good reason for doing so, or else—”

 _“Yeah, I do, it’s just you never answer me, you always let it go to voicemail, and—look, I’m going to call Laura next, but you’re closest, so…I’m staying in a hotel for a couple days. I’ll text you all the address, and no, it’s not because I killed somebody,”_ Derek says, his tone veering from worried to resentful to belligerent.

Peter would have his family problems resurfacing now. “You lost your lease?”

 _“No. I didn’t even do anything, I just came home and they had the whole place taped off for a gas leak,”_ Derek snaps. _“An actual leak. Not a cover story. There’s a broken line and I can’t go back in, and anyway, I’m just letting you know so you don’t complain when you can’t reach me, all right?”_

Just as Peter’s about to reply, that skittering noise starts up again in the wall right behind the bed. It might just be Peter’s very malicious-feeling imagination, but it sounds downright gleeful.

 _“Peter?”_ Derek says. _“Peter? Are you…you’re in Massachusetts with Stiles, right?”_

“Yes. Yes, we’re in Arkham, and thank you for telling me, Derek. Not having yourself blown up sounds sensible. Have a good night.” Then Peter hangs up the phone. There’s another noise, a strange, uneven creak, and it takes him an ungodly amount of time to figure out it’s the sound of his grinding teeth.

He is _not_ leaving.

* * *

When Stiles wakes up and discovers that the handcuffs worked, he’s so delighted that Peter feels uncharacteristically reluctant about telling him about the noises. “This is going to help me narrow down what it is about the house that keeps kicking you out, too,” he says as they sit down to breakfast. “It’s always way easier to track down the cause when you know what the target is, and, well—”

“Yes.” Peter carefully adds sugar to his coffee, so that he doesn’t lose control of himself and just stab his spoon down into the mug. “Clearly. Stiles, have you noticed anything else about the house? Anything that’s changed since you left?”

“No, but that’s definitely on the to-do list. There are a couple hexes that might act like this, though it’s a little weird that they’d end up tagging you and not me,” Stiles says. “Also all the inside wards are intact, but maybe somebody shoved something in one of the gutters, it wouldn’t be the…Peter? You okay?”

“Hmm?” Peter says, looking up.

Stiles gives him a dubious look, and then gently tugs on the cuffs so Peter’s arm shifts a little towards him. “Okay, I was going to try and look it up first because I know you offered, but I don’t want to treat you like a private walking werewolf encyclopedia, but…do bloodshot eyes and mixing up the sugar and salt mean the same thing for you as they would for a person?”

Peter looks at him. Then down at the coffee. He sniffs, then lets out a disgusted sigh and pushes the mug away.

“So…I know I can crash pretty hard, but I think I’d wake up if blasphemous geometries teleported us into the hall,” Stiles says slowly, sidling around the table to peer into Peter’s face. The glow of his phone is just visible over the edge of the table, on his free hand’s side. “What’d I miss?”

“Oh, just some phantom rats,” Peter mutters. He rubs at his eyes, then gets up from the table. Stiles obligingly lifts their cuffed hands and he walks around behind the other man to dump out his coffee and pour a fresh cup, only to catch himself as Stiles suddenly makes an alarmed noise.

“Wait, just thought of something, let me just—” Stiles bolts up from his seat and grabs the cup just as Peter’s lifting it to his lips. He puts it back on the counter and opens a drawer. Frowns, tilts his head, and then makes an ‘ah!’ noise and scoots around Peter to get at a drawer on the other side of the kitchen.

The space is wide enough that he has to lean out on a single foot to hook the drawer handle with his fingertips. He pulls the handle a few inches, his free arm flailing for counterbalance, and then digs around inside till he finds what looks like an old-fashioned ivory cheese knife. With a triumphant look on his face, he smacks the drawer shut and then attempts to pivot as if they aren’t handcuffed together.

Peter had been expecting something like that to happen, and as Stiles yelps and windmills both arms, he grabs his new coffee from the counter, lets the other man drag him forward, and then swoops their cuffed hands across Stiles to scoop him upright. Stiles yelps again and scrabbles at Peter, then goes slack as he gets handholds on Peter’s upper arms. He huffs a little in relief, still wild-eyed. Then he sees the coffee.

“Wait! Wait, wait,” he says, while rearranging himself from desperately clingy to deliberately obstructive. With his elbow in Peter’s face, he gingerly dips the ivory blade into the coffee, holds it in place for a few seconds, and then takes it out.

The blade is slightly browned, but otherwise unchanged. Expression still suspicious, Stiles backs off and takes out his phone, and scans the ivory—unicorn horn, Peter now realizes—using one of his apps.

“I thought that poisons were a little pedestrian for the Great Old Ones,” Peter says.

“Yeah, they are, but you never know about the cultists, especially Nyarlathotep followers. Those guys like to get over-complicated,” Stiles mutters. He pokes at his phone, then looks up. “It’s okay, you can drink it.”

Peter nods in thanks and starts to raise the cup to his lips. Then he stops, shaking his head at himself. He pulls out his vial of wolfsbane tincture and then he and Stiles give it the same look at the same time.

“Um.” Stiles opens up a different app on his phone and then nudges them into the living room so he can find and stick on one of his probes. “Hang on a sec, I think I’d better just scan things.”

“Or we could go out for breakfast instead?” Peter suggests. “I do remember quite a few coffeeshops on the way over, and most of them looked more interested in overcharging to finance their interior designer than in stealing your sanity.”

Stiles hesitates. “Yeah, true. I just…but you heard rats, on top of the teleportation, and that’s two ways the house is acting up now, and I should—Arkham’s weird, okay, but I really wanted you to see the non-hostile side of that, and—”

“And I can think of no better way than introducing me to artisan coffee and local pastries,” Peter says, just as distress starts to weave into the irritation in Stiles’ scent. “Preferably the cream-filled ones. I do love my cream.”

“We’re standing in my kitchen, being abused by my house, and suddenly I want to jump you,” Stiles says after a moment, with a mixture of irritation and delightfully baffled interest. “With _food porn_ ideas and we’re already handcuffed, Peter. You know this is really, really not right.”

“Well, if you’re going to be like that, I suppose I can settle for the jelly ones instead,” Peter says. “Even if they don’t quite have that same mouthfeel. Far too sticky.”

Stiles opens his mouth, closes it, jabs Peter in the chest, and then sighs and slouches up for a kiss. Which may turn into three plus some nuzzling when Stiles decides to stick his free hand down the back of Peter’s pajama pants and fondle a buttock, but Peter’s been alive far too long to succumb to the stupidity of falling into bed in the middle of a known unknown. Within the half-hour—delay being down to the handcuffs, in a completely nonsexual, purely logistical manner—they’ve relocated themselves to a local café with decent coffee and _very_ good profiteroles.

“Okay, recapping, it started after I fell asleep, and stopped a couple minutes before I woke up. And you don’t think it was tied to me at all. No syncing with heartbeat, or moving around, or, um, my sinuses sometimes get blocked, I’ve been known to grunt,” Stiles says, alternating between tapping at his laptop and stuffing his face with a chocolate croissant. “Not snore. I’ve taped it, it’s definitely a grunt.”

“No, I don’t think it had anything to do with your biorhythms. And anyway, aren’t you out of the age range for poltergeist activity?” Peter says.

Stiles looks up, blinking rapidly, and then grins appreciatively as he crunches into his croissant. “Yeah, and also, having regular and _awesome_ sex, which usually kills that,” he mumbles. Buttery flakes sprinkle his mouth, and when he wipes at that with his finger, he leaves behind a thick, creamy-looking smear of chocolate on his upper lip. “But you always want to rule out the more mundane supernatural causes, Whipple’s Law and all. Even in this town, there’s not _always_ an evil agent of cosmic chaos behind it. Sometimes it really is just an angry dead person.”

“Well, if that’s the case, I assure you, I’ll be happy to handle the exorcism,” Peter says. “God knows I’ve had to step in and assist Deaton on enough of those. You know, for a druid he’s remarkably squeamish on bread-and-butter matters like that. Never wants to do the sensible thing and break out the chains, as if a possessed person is really going to care about people being nice to them.”

“On the other hand, they do eventually stop being possessed, and not everybody’s got werewolf healing. But they usually _do_ have a lawyer, and they’re always a lot less grateful than you’d think about losing the demon,” Stiles says, bobbing his head in a way that indicates the words aren’t original to him.

Peter sighs. “Yes, true, and God knows Melissa McCall is worse than any demon if she’s got to deal with lawyers.”

“Wonder if that was from the divorce, or if it predates it. If so, maybe she and my dad got it from the same place,” Stiles mutters. He works at his spreadsheet for a little longer, getting chocolate rubbed over his lower lip in the meantime. Then his phone beeps and he picks it up. “Oh, good, my landlord’s…it’s not my landlord. Damn it. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, what the hell, do they have a watch on my…oh. Right. I should add that.”

“Your professor?” Peter guesses, based on the change in Stiles’ scent. Whenever the conversation veers anywhere near his future plans, it gets a very distinct tang of dread.

Stiles makes a face as he slouches down the back of the booth. “Yeah. Though I like Holt, he straight-up tells you to your face he’s going to shoot first if he sees you mess around on him. I don’t think he’d jinx my place just to make me make up my mind faster.”

“I don’t know that it’s your place, either,” Peter says.

“What? No, it’s definitely the place. I mean, I know it’s targeting you, but the stuff that’s happened so far, that’s place-specific and my house is known for it,” Stiles says, looking up. He pauses, then ducks his head and scratches at the side of his face. He must have chocolate under his nails as well, because he leaves a dark brown streak down his cheekbone. “You know, if it makes you feel any better, I went through some crap when I first moved in.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about my feelings,” Peter says after a second. “I’ve had to tolerate far worse.”

“Yeah, sure, but that was your family,” Stiles says. “You have to put up with them. You don’t have to put up with this, and I just—I was—it was just kind of nice that you’d come along with me in the first place.”

Peter laughs. He’s not mocking the man, he’s just amused that Stiles would even think to compare this situation with what Peter’s family has put him through, but he realizes he’s erred when Stiles stiffens up.

So he stops laughing. He does keep smiling, but he lowers his head, softens the set of his shoulders—Stiles isn’t a werewolf so he won’t understand all the nuances, but even for humans, that sort of body language resonates. So does the quieter tone he uses, and the slow, careful way he moves to sit on the bench by Stiles. Stopping a few inches away at first, and then, once Stiles has breathed out, pushing over so that their hips are flush.

“I obviously have some ground to make up, if my company only strikes you as ‘kind of nice,’” Peter says. He retrieves a napkin and rubs at the chocolate on Stiles’ cheek. 

Stiles half-heartedly pushes his wrist away, then sees the stained napkin. Embarrassment spikes in Stiles’ scent and he licks a finger and then swipes off the rest of the chocolate. Then he snatches the napkin from Peter to wipe off his finger. “Oh, come on, you know exactly how many times this summer you’ve blown my mind. I’m just saying, after that, coming over here and getting hit with an Arkham special can’t be anything but a huge reality check.”

“Reality check? Of what?” Peter says, and when Stiles lets out an incredulous noise, he simply continues to smile at the other man. “I’m not an idealist, you know that. But I’m serious, Stiles. I never thought that we were coming here for _me_ , so why you’d think I’d expect some sort of, oh, Shangri-La of black magic—”

“Which I guess you’re kind of getting anyway, even without full library access,” Stiles says. He flicks the napkin back onto the table and then, when he turns back, looks startled to find Peter still sitting there, all huge eyes and deliciously vulnerable lips. “Because that’s Arkham in a nutshell. And it looks cool from far off, and I mean, I’ve lived here for years, but tons of people can’t stand it and go screaming out of town, and it’s one thing to tolerate stuff but I was kind of hoping you weren’t just tolerating—”

Frankly, the chocolate’s unnecessary icing. But it _is_ there, and Peter does need to interrupt the man, and it’s as good a way of doing it as any. And after the first uncertain moment, when Peter finds himself holding his own breath…Stiles is the one who opens up the kiss, reaching up and wrapping his hand over the back of Peter’s neck as Peter gently scrapes the chocolate off his lips, sneaking his other hand under the table to press suggestively across Peter’s belly. It’s far more Stiles’ doing than Peter’s when they both end up panting.

“I am not,” Peter says, using a crisp tone to get Stiles’ attention. When he has it, he leans in again so the weight of Stiles’ hand on his neck rocks their foreheads together. “Tolerating this. I have every intention of ensuring that we find the cause of your house’s issues and deal with it, in as final way as possible.”

Stiles smiles. It’s smaller and softer than his usual smile, but then, that one’s braced with sarcasm and an attack-for-defense approach. Which Peter appreciates, but for what it is, just as he appreciates this smile for what it’s taken to pull it out of the man.

“Does this have anything to do with Scott actually getting _annoyed_ talking about how you made him and Deaton upgrade the clinic’s furnace?” Stiles says, tugging playfully at the little curls at Peter’s hairline.

“It was for the greater good,” Peter snorts. “You should ask him, did he want his mother to have to keep double-stacking bodies in the morgue? That’s very disrespectful to the dead, you know, and even I don’t cross that line. When I bury my enemies, I do it properly.”

“You know, you and Dad are going to have so many things to complain together,” Stiles says. He draws back a little and his elbow jiggles his laptop. He sheepishly twists around to steady it, which takes both his hands away from Peter, unfortunately. “I know he was in a hurry, but I think he might actually be okay with you.”

Peter’s well aware of how much Stiles’ father means to him, and also of how it probably looks to the man, a much older werewolf—with the damn Hale reputation, on top of that—seducing his only child. So of course he’s pleased to hear that. What catches him off-guard, however, is how _sharp_ his surprise is. He’s used to the world not giving him any recognition—or too much so, when he wasn’t even remotely involved.

“Speak of the dead, I’ll have to remember to say that over my sister’s grave this winter solstice,” Peter finds himself saying without much conscious thought. “She was always saying the day I had someone’s parent approve of me was the day she’d give me one of her claws.”

“I know I turned out weird, but I think my dad and I are both glad I’m an only child,” Stiles says. “None of these bitchy bets.”

Peter snorts, but then shakes his head. “It wasn’t really a bet. Werewolf claws are—especially an alpha’s, they have power all on their own. It was more her way of challenging me to be nicer, our version of a golden ring, because no matter what I did, she was always hoping…anyway, it’s a moot point now.”

“Okay,” Stiles says simply. He’s turned sober, Peter only now notices, and he waits a few seconds before he shrugs and pulls his laptop towards him. “Anyway, the house, till we find the cause, there are a couple things we can do to try and make it better. If we catch Brown Jenkin, he’s got some influence so we might be able to scare him into tamping things down a little. And then—”

“What’s the matter with your place?” says Lydia.

Sometime during Peter’s little digression on Talia, the woman had entered the café, obtained a double espresso and a plate of madeleines, and had slipped up so close that when Stiles starts and accidentally kicks out the table, she’s quicker than Peter to catch and stop it.

“Lyds! Lyds, hey, I…wait. I’m mad at you,” Stiles says, flipping from flustered to narrow-eyed. He resettles his laptop and then, much to Peter’s glee—which Peter is very happy to display to her—pops himself onto Peter’s lap instead of pulling the table back. “I thought about it, and I know I was ignoring you, but that doesn’t give you the right to judge my life choices or stick your Beacon Hills issues on me. And if you and Peter need to hash out some stuff…okay, I respect that, but also, I’m still going to need him for dating purposes, so—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not going to bother dragging up his nonsense. Which, aside from my mother, who should _not_ come up if you two are dating, was never as clever or as penetrating as he obviously thought he was being,” Lydia says. As she speaks, she tosses her hair, appropriates a chair from the next table over, and plants her cup and plate on the table behind Stiles’ laptop. “And all right, I’ll admit I overstepped. You’re not responsible for endangering my dissertation. My idiotic advisor can do that all on his own.”

Stiles shifts around on Peter’s knees, glancing repeatedly at his laptop as if he’d like to get back to working on that. Then he sighs and gives Peter an apologetic glance. “When did that happen? No, wait, let me guess: in one of those emails I didn’t answer.”

Lydia actually betrays a hint of amusement amid her annoyance, and that is when Peter knows for sure that she does, in fact, like Stiles. “Last week. His standing grant with NASA was reduced so now he wants to cut out the telluric current modeling.”

“But…but that’s the entire point,” Stiles says, starting to pick up her outrage. “I mean, without that, it’s just making historical maps.”

“I _know_ , as if that’s going to impress anyone into giving him the money to make up the difference. I don’t know why he ever got involved in the Miskatonic program, he’d need a Cthulhu intervention just to give him any imagination,” Lydia says. She tosses her hair behind one shoulder, seething, and then sits up to take a madeleine from her plate. After nibbling it, she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, wiggles on her seat, and then looks back at them. “Well. Now then. You’re back in town, and having Peter stay with you, and it appears there are problems?”

“And it appears you have opinions on that?” Peter says. He can feel Stiles’ confused stare on him, but he didn’t miss the way Lydia’s eyes slid from him back to Stiles. “You do realize that _Scott_ isn’t here.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t, but thank you for volunteering that,” Lydia says airily. “I’ve learned never to assume who might be around, if _you_ are.”

Stiles clears his throat. Then pointedly shuts his laptop. “Okay. I did not get filled in here, because I don’t know, I thought it might be polite to not jump into sleeping grudges that aren’t even mine. But clearly, they’re not sleeping, they’re up and popping popcorn because it’s going to be a mega-marathon of best hits. That I do not understand.”

It would be a mistake to look chagrined in front of Lydia, so Peter doesn’t. But he does make a note to himself to clear that one up with Stiles immediately; he should’ve done it last night, but being constantly relocated had made it slip his mind. And he really should have known better than to assume Lydia, of all people, would make a mere one-off appearance.

“Well, I could make you understand, but I think you’ll want to take notes, and for that you’ll need at least a fresh external drive,” Lydia says dryly, in between sips of her coffee. “But like I said, it’s past, and I am willing to leave it that way. I also do want to make up for my exit yesterday.”

“And…get yourself off the list of suspects?” Stiles says, his head tilted, sounding reluctantly amused.

Lydia shrugs. “Not that I even know what’s going _on_ , but yes. Especially as neither of us have any idea what the other’s been doing all summer, and I have nothing to do but wait on my advisor to ditch his pride and let me find another grant.”

“Yeah, I can tell you’re bor—wait. Wait, am _I_ a suspect in something?” Stiles says, straightening up. “Even if I’d answered your emails, that’s not a whole summer, what—”

“Just how helpful could you be?” Peter asks. And then smiles when Lydia turns a gaze more fit for a basilisk than a banshee on him. “If you don’t mind. I’m new to _this_ town, you see.”

It’s Stiles who answers, and he does so with a combination of reluctant honesty and nervousness. He’s smelling like he’s worried over Peter’s reaction again. “Well, she’s helped me out with the house before, she’s familiar with it. And MIT’s neural-network programs develop evil sentience a lot less often than Miskatonic math students go insane, so if we wanna try speeding up the data analysis…”

Lydia looks a little startled. “What on earth could you two have done?” she says. “I thought you only just got here.”

“Yeah, we did, and how you know that—”

“Your father’s assistant always loads up on aspirin just before you come back,” Lydia says. “It’s not that difficult to put an alert on her credit card.”

Stiles makes a face at her. Then twists around and looks at Peter, and it takes a moment for Peter to realize the other man is waiting for his input. No one ever waits for that from Peter; he has to trick them into letting him give it. And it’s not his house, not even his _town_.

“You are the expert,” Peter says, still surprised. “And Lydia and I have worked together before, so I acknowledge it’s not impossible with her.”

“And a lot less difficult than some other people I could name.” Lydia puts down her cup and then picks up a napkin to dab delicately at her mouth. “But won’t.”

“Well, okay, then,” Stiles says. He still looks a little dubious about both of them, but he gives Peter’s thigh a quick pat before opening his laptop again. “Rat noises and the angles keep tossing Peter in the hall.”

“Rat noises?” Lydia says with a frown. “But he’s a werewolf and you’re you, that shouldn’t come up.”

“The rat noises usually come up when there’s some sort of terrible inherited history to be revealed and triggered,” Stiles explains. “But those are usually about people suddenly getting in touch with the, um, the…the rawr in them…”

Peter does love Stiles’ awkward, highly idiosyncratic miming. He watches the man try to pretend to be the inner beast, then smiles and catches Stiles’ left hand before it tips over his coffee. “A problem I don’t have, since I’m quite clear on what my family’s made me.”

“Well, that does sound like an analytical problem, but as for the angles, why don’t you just have him fix the doors or something like that?” Lydia says. “That worked for that one housemate of yours.”

“But that doesn’t fix the root, Lyds, that just sucks up to the house so it gets less enthusiastic about playing a—huh.” Stiles taps his fingers against the table, thinking it over. Then he turns to Peter. “Then again…so the house can be, um, loyal. It doesn’t care about guests, but if you convince it you’re a resident, sometimes it’ll start siding with you. I mean, I know you’re not, and it’s not an actual binding commitment, I promise, your name isn’t going to be magically written in blood on the lease or anything like that—”

“Stiles,” Peter says, interrupting the man’s increasingly panicked ramble. “Stiles. I’d be happy to do a little housekeeping, if that’s what we need to do. I do think the angles are the more immediate problem—we can research the real cause instead of sleeping, but we can hardly investigate if I can’t manage to stay in the house.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” Stiles slumps a little in relief. He gives Peter a grin, one that’s a bit closer to his real smile than to his sarcastic one, and then returns to his laptop. After a second of tapping, he shoots Lydia a wary glance. “Well, if you want to come around here so I can talk you and Peter through it at the same time…”

“I promise I won’t take advantage,” Peter says, while pointedly putting his hands on Stiles’ waist.

Lydia narrows her eyes at him, and for a moment, he thinks he might get a whiff of possessiveness in her scent. It’s certainly not simple anger, but then, neither she nor Stiles smell of lust when they’re reacting to each other.

“I’ll keep that promise in mind,” she says, making it a cool threat, as she pulls her chair around.

* * *

The rest of breakfast is taken up with Stiles and Lydia’s discussion of the rat noises, which, try as hard as Peter can, he can’t quite keep up with. His knowledge of the Cthulhic has greatly improved since he met Stiles, but he’s never been much for math, and exceedingly esoteric branches of that make up the bulk of their talk.

From what he can gather, they suspect the rat noises might be a sign of a greater influence working upon the house, but they need more data to test that hypothesis. When Lydia finally leaves, it’s to go search the university and town databases for said data.

“You look happy to be back here,” Stiles says, as he and Peter lug several bags from the local hardware store up onto the house’s front porch. “Sorry if Lydia and I got really technical there.”

“Well, the more precise you are, the less likely she is to come back with questions. That’s a benefit as far as I’m concerned,” Peter says. 

He takes Stiles’ bags from him so Stiles can unlock the door, expecting that Stiles will recuff their wrists, but instead the other man firmly stuffs his hand into the back pocket of Peter’s jeans and tows Peter along by that. Not that Peter is, in any way, shape, or form, objecting…though it does get a little tight, turning into Stiles’ apartment from the hall.

“I forgot the cuffs in the car,” Stiles says. “Figured I’d help you get all the stuff inside first and then go back out to get it.”

“Considerate of you, though you know, I _am_ a werewolf, and these are hardly unmanageable,” Peter says, setting the bags down on the coffee table. “Then again, I suppose it’s unwise to make the neighbors suspicious, even if they decorate their windows with fetish dolls.”

“Well, it’s not like you guys try at the whole masquerade either, you know?” Stiles says, pivoting around. He slips between Peter and the table, and snugs up to tap reprovingly at Peter’s chest. “Any of you. At least with Scott, I’m pretty sure it just honestly slips his mind that he’s a werewolf, but you. I think you _enjoy_ being that weird flicker you see out of the corner of your eye.”

“Of course I do, Stiles,” Peter says, smiling, and when Stiles snorts and pinches his ass, he just smiles more broadly and leans into the pinch so Stiles’ fingers spread to cup the buttock instead. “It’s a lost art, that kind of terror. Everyone these days outright demands buckets of gore, so subtlety might just be the best way to hide in plain sight.”

Stiles’ brows twitch with exasperation, but his hand’s gone from jabbing Peter’s chest to flattening against it, and not in a stiff-arming sort of way. On the contrary, the way it’s fitting along the bottom of Peter’s pectoral is distinctly encouraging. “No wonder you annoy Lydia. She hates it when people talk in circles around her.”

Something about how Stiles says that pulls Peter up short. The man’s scent and heartbeat are fine, no increased nerves, but there’s just that slight, if casual, edge, and Peter remembers again how abashed Stiles had been, talking about the reason he considered Lydia at least semi-friendly. As if it’s at all his fault that other people are smallminded.

“I suppose that truce aside, she’ll eventually get around to telling you about our past run-ins,” Peter sighs. “I’m happy to—”

“Yeah. Yeah, she will. And I think I’m going to ask Scott too. And Allison.” Stiles pauses as if to invite a remark from Peter. “It’s kind of funny they didn’t mention her. Or anybody else, actually.”

“Well, that’s probably because she never was particularly involved in things. And frankly, if she’d been _less_ involved, it would have made several—anyway. Long story short, a boy Lydia was dating was briefly mixed up with Laura and Derek.” Peter can’t help a grimace, and then makes a note to himself to double-check whether Whittemore’s still on the other side of the Atlantic. Which is much closer to Arkham, come to think of it, and damn. He supposes he’ll have to go back to cultivating Deaton and Deaton’s British connections. “She came along with him, but neither of them were ever very suitable, and frankly, I think she was just in it for the information. The banshee information—she never was that interested in werewolves.”

“Oh, really?” Stiles says, blinking thoughtfully. “You know, she talks up how she’s a hereditary banshee, but every now and then she’ll say something and I kind of thought her family hadn’t been too traditional.”

“My understanding is that her mother rebelled against what she thought was backwoods nonsense by marrying a complete skeptic and pretending she’d never heard of the supernatural. I will credit Lydia for not following in her footsteps,” Peter says. He pauses, then sighs and makes himself go on. “And since we’re there, what she was referring to in the café was that I once asked her mother out in order to get her to stop ignoring us.”

“Ignoring you?” Stiles says. So far he doesn’t seem to be too upset, although he’s stopped squeezing Peter’s buttock. “I guess if anybody could, it’d be Lyds, but still. Really?”

“Really. We had a darach murdering people and we could have used Lydia’s help in tracking down the woman before she struck again. But this was after she and her boyfriend had broken up and she didn’t want anything to do with us—she wouldn’t speak to Scott or Melissa, and she got her father to threaten Chris with jail time if he came near her.” That’s safe enough to relate, and the McCalls will corroborate Peter. The next part, on the other hand…Peter hates to do it, but he thinks it’s prudent to take a step back from Stiles, and put himself near the window, which is the nearest exit. “Her parents were separated but not divorced, and her mother was working at the school and obviously lonely, and I knew asking her out would infuriate Lydia so much that she’d go straight to Laura and Scott to complain about me.”

Stiles purses his lips a few times. His scent is hard to read—it’s certainly not happy, but Peter wouldn’t characterize it as angry either. “Your idea?”

“Yes,” Peter says. He debates for a second. “I didn’t discuss it with Scott or Melissa beforehand. I did mention it to Laura and Derek, but too late for them to stop me.”

“I guess if any of them had been in on it, Lydia would have figured it out, and probably would’ve gone the other way and sicced the darach on you,” Stiles says after a second. He tilts his head, apparently oblivious of Peter’s surprise at how perfectly that follows Peter’s original line of thinking, and then snorts and pokes Peter in the chest again. “So how close was she to doing that anyway?”

Peter grimaces at the memory. “Close enough that honestly, I was very relieved to hear she’d moved away with her mother.”

“Yeah, well, using innocent family is not cool, and I can’t really blame her for reacting like that,” Stiles says in a very matter-of-fact way. But his hand’s still tucked into Peter’s pocket, and when he moves, it’s towards Peter, his other hand smoothing up Peter’s chest and then curling meaningfully around the back of Peter’s neck. “Also, Dad? Is not okay with that, and however you got it past Melissa, it’s not going to work on him.”

“And…you?” Peter says, holding his breath a little.

“Me, well, I said I didn’t think it was cool.” Stiles pauses, but his fingers squeeze a little at Peter’s nape. They startle a noise out of Peter and Stiles blinks hard, then starts to smile. “But I’ve pulled stuff close enough to that that I shouldn’t be a hypocrite, and anyway, it wasn’t my mom, it was Lydia’s, and since she’s decided to help, it does seem like she’s made her call. God knows she wouldn’t do that just because I like you.”

Peter has a bit of a suspicion otherwise, but he has not and never will be a saint, and the past few minutes—even if Stiles’ intelligence did make them necessary—are already verging too close to sacrifice for his tastes. Besides, as Stiles says, Lydia’s quite capable of speaking up for herself. If and when she wants to correct Stiles on that one, she will. In the meantime, Peter isn’t going to do it for her.

“We did miss her research skills,” Peter adds after a moment. “Deaton and the Argents can be so traditional about where they look for their knowledge. It was useful to have another person willing to look elsewhere, even at the cost of her temper.”

“Yeah, Lydia’s pretty awesome in that department,” Stiles says. He gives Peter’s nape a tug that’s definitely tending towards a caress, then pivots away from Peter’s front and over to dig one-handed in the bags. “I think between her algorithms and my database access, we should get this fixed before you lose another night of sleep. So, I think we should probably start with the water stains in the corner th—”

His phone beeps. Frowning, Stiles hands off the can of spray primer to Peter and then takes out the phone. He swipes a few times, then lets out a groan so aggravated that Peter feels justified in peeking over his shoulder.

When Stiles notices, he just moves the phone higher so Peter has a better view: it’s an email from a Professor Whateley, asking if Stiles is available for coffee to discuss a potential research position. “I’m gonna have to see who else is hacking my dad’s assistant, because I swear, I wasn’t this popular before I got my degree,” Stiles says. “Ugh. This guy, I didn’t even apply to work with him.”

“And he’s not taking no for an answer?” Peter says, about to volunteer his very sterling—if he does say so himself, but so does most of Beacon Hills—services in that regard.

Stiles hunches up in embarrassment. “Okay, well…I kind of haven’t said a _no_ no, yet. I had a class with him my last semester and the grades weren’t all finalized—but they are now, even he can’t pull any shit, so you know what, I should just cut this one loose. Just give me a…oh, um…”

It looks like Stiles would like to leave the room to make that call, but of course he can’t do that and be sure the house won’t deport Peter. After a second’s contemplation, Peter picks up the bag with the patching kit for the screen door in the back. “It’s a lovely day, some time outside wouldn’t be unwelcome,” he says.

Relieved, Stiles sees him to the back porch, which, since Peter is already out, shouldn’t trigger anything, and then goes around to the front to make his call. Peter watches him go while laying out the parts of the kit, and when Stiles is far enough away, Peter walks to the edge of the porch. He tests the railing and when he’s assured as to its durability, he leaps up onto it and peers over the roof.

Predictably, there’s a small, wrinkly face staring back to him. Brown Jenkin chitters maliciously at him from the sill of the highest window, and when Peter tries to pull himself up, only to have the fragile gutter bend under his weight, the little demon goes so far as to climb down onto the siding to have a good mocking laugh at Peter.

Which is when Peter pulls out the sling and nails Brown Jenkin with a blessed acorn. Per the research Peter did while he wasn’t sleeping—which was purely for revenge but after all, Peter _has_ just learned it will help Stiles tame the house, too—Brown Jenkin actually is vulnerable to earthly religious artifacts. The acorn works perfectly, knocking the pest off the wall onto the roof, where its stunned body rolls right into Peter’s right hand.

“Listen to me,” Peter says, holding up the ugly thing so it can see him. “I am staying here at Stiles’ express invitation, and I will be doing it without interference from you, or from anything within your power. I also happen to know some people who would be very, very interested in you. You see, they run an exorcism business.”

Then he holds up his phone so that Brown Jenkin can get a look at the screen. Brown Jenkin glances over contemptuously, then freezes. Its beady eyes widen till they nearly meet in the middle of its deformed skull.

“They train all their cats themselves. Really quite impressive to see in action,” Peter says. “Do we understand each other?”

He gives Brown Jenkin a squeeze, then places it back on the roof. The thing squeaks at him, cringing, tail and nose vibrating madly. Then it flees back up the wall and into the window so quickly that within the second, Peter can’t see a speck of it.

Humming, Peter hops back down onto the porch. He wipes off his hands with holy water, just in case, and then gets to examining the bent gutter.

“Oh, man, that too?” Stiles says, coming back around the corner. “You know, no wonder the house is being pissy. Asshole housemates didn’t look after the place at all while I was gone.”

“Well, well, it’ll be taken care of now,” Peter says. He gives the gutter a pat and then steps back. “Now let’s just see if we can have the house singing a different tune.”

And indeed, when Peter and Stiles finally stop and try entering the house separately, Peter successfully stays inside. They’ve yet to test the rat noises, but it’s a good sign, Peter thinks.

Sadly, he’s mistaken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rat noises are from Lovecraft's _The Rats in the Walls_ , shocker. 
> 
> "Unicorn" horn tests for poison were a real thing back in medieval times.
> 
> Peter did not bite Lydia in this AU; Jackson did, as part of their weird unhealthy co-dependent rivalry relationship.
> 
> One theory for poltergeist activity is that it springs out of the excess energy of a nearby troubled adolescent; some people have put forth anecdotal reports that poltergeist activity has ceased when said adolescent entered a happy romantic relationship or ended an unhappy one.
> 
> Lovecraft really didn't bother making the Cthulhu Mythos internally consistent, so while in most stories, earthly religions are just plain irrelevant to the Great Old One, _Dreams in the Witch-House_ 's villains react negatively to a crucifix at one point.


	4. Chapter 4

The next morning, John gets up with the dawn. Once he’s run himself through the bathroom, he changes into his sweats and sneakers and goes for a jog. He sticks to Chris’ backyard, remembering about the sheriff, but honestly, the yard’s so enormous that a few laps do him just fine.

That done, he goes back up, showers, changes, and comes downstairs to the smell of sizzling bacon. Which comes with waffles, a bowl of fruit, fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee, and Chris sitting off to the side with muddy boots and his coat on, looking at something on his phone. There’s a used plate in the sink and a mostly empty mug at Chris’ elbow.

“Did we change the schedule?” John says. “I could’ve sworn Melissa said we’d get into the preserve at—”

“Hmm? Oh, no, you’re fine. Sit down, take your time,” Chris says, putting his phone down. Then he gets up. Gives one chair a passing nudge with his hand to turn it towards John as he walks back into the kitchen. Then he refills his mug. “If you don’t like anything, just let me know. The waffles are plain, but there’s jam if you don’t want maple syrup. Or we’ve got some honey somewhere…”

A tiny, very rude part of John wants to take a photo of the table and text it to his son. But he doesn’t, because he is a respectable person and also, he doesn’t want Stiles coming up with some way to remotely cut off his access to this kind of food. He just sits down and pulls over his plate. “Syrup’s fine, thanks. This looks great.”

“Good.” Chris is still at the coffee machine. “Sorry if I made you nervous. I just like to get up early and get in a patrol. Melissa won’t be over for another twenty minutes, so no rush.”

“Find anything?” John asks.

The coffee drip finishes and Chris comes back to the table. He puts the mug down and stands to John’s right as he adds milk and sugar. “Nothing I need to follow up on. It’s actually been pretty quiet, aside from whatever’s trying to grow up in the Nemeton’s place. I…am probably being too paranoid for my own good, but that isn’t a clue, is it?”

John stares at his third piece of waffle. “Hmm. Normally I’d say no, but aside from the timing, is this unusual?”

“Well…probably not. We’re a pretty strong nexus, but even we have off-weeks, and even off-months sometimes,” Chris says after a moment. He taps his spoon absently against the side of his mug. “Anyway, we’ve mostly got our act together now, and word’s out that the town isn’t an easy knock-over, which weeds out some of the trouble. We were expecting a surge after the Nemeton went out, but we put a bunch of things in place to try and handle that, and so far they’ve all been working and…like I said, I’m paranoid.”

“Keeps your blood moving,” John shrugs.

Chris snorts, amused, and then sits back down. He takes one sip of coffee, then grimaces, glances at John, and takes off his coat. “By the way, Alan emailed, your tests are all done. He sent over the results, so Melissa’s probably going to want to talk through them.”

“Yeah, sure,” John says, reaching for his phone.

“If you need some time to read them over and digest, she’s not going to rush you,” Chris says. His hand even twitches over the table, like he’d thought about reaching out to stop John. “She’s got some meetings with the sheriff today anyway, trying to clear off the deck so she has all the time you need for the rest of the week.”

John slows his hand, looking at the other man. Then he takes his phone out anyway, but just sets it next to his plate. When he goes back to eating, Chris does slouch slightly, revealing that he had, in fact, tensed up. “Just how bad is this guy?” John asks.

Chris looks into his coffee. “I wouldn’t say he’s bad,” he says, in the kind of slow, deliberate tone certain types of people use to be diplomatic instead of swearing their head off. “He’s just…doing his job the way he thinks it should be done.”

“Like I said, how bad is he?” John says.

“Well, he keeps getting reelected,” Chris says with a shrug. He glances up and his mouth’s almost quirked into a dry smile, right before he covers that up with a swallow of coffee. “Hasn’t gotten killed either, can’t say that for the mayor and the county prosecutor.”

“So that means he’s doing something right?” John says. Then he flips his hand at Chris, on the way to eating up the last of his fruit salad. “Never mind, don’t answer that. You have to live with the guy, I don’t. And you don’t have to tell me everything that goes on here.”

“It’s not that, really. It’s more like…I don’t know what the man does, most of the time.” Chris pushes himself up, then shakes his head over his coffee, letting out a wry chuckle. “Melissa works more with him, but honestly, at this point, we do our damnedest to keep him out of it, and when we do work with the police, it’s one of his deputies and I’m pretty sure neither Tara nor Jordan tell him what the hell we’re really up to. Which doesn’t sound good, I know…”

“What works, that’s what matters.” John has a mouthful and he washes it down with some juice. Dribbles it, like the morning slob he is, and casts around a little before finding the napkin and wiping himself up. “Anyway, again, I don’t live here.”

Chris nods appreciatively, but he still looks a little unsettled. “Yeah, true, but Miskatonic—I looked it up more after I heard about it from Stiles, reached out to some relatives in France, and with that kind of team—program—”

“Well, department, actually, but on the other hand, that doesn’t have to mean anything but a bunch of stupid hand-me-down traditions and more layers than a mummy’s wrapper,” John mutters. Then catches the surprised way Chris is looking at him, so he attempts to look less cynical. He’s here as the visiting expert and shouldn’t be undermining his own authority. “Arkham’s a weird place. I make damn sure not to compare it to anywhere else, and I tell everybody who asks the same.”

“I guess that’s the benefit of a small town,” Chris says after a second. “The sheriff’s got to be factored in, him and a few other people, but we usually can get away with telling them after it’s all over. Usually it’s just me and Melissa and a couple of the Hales working it out.”

“Scott in there too, isn’t he?” John says, drinking more juice. “At least, so my son says.”

“Yeah, well…” Chris gets an exasperated expression on his face, but one that’s liberally mixed with a pretty substantial dose of affection. Considering Scott’s not his kid, and is dating his actual daughter. “He’s got a good heart, and he usually does listen to us. It’s just getting hold of him before he runs off and does—but he and Melissa have worked that out pretty well these days. Speaking of…I think that’s her, just wait a second.”

It is Melissa whose car is pulling up the driveway, and a couple minutes later, she bustles into the kitchen with Chris trailing behind her. She says hello to John, asks how he slept, and then goes back to poking at Chris’ boots with her sneakers.

“I don’t know why we asked Laura to take over this week if you’re just going to go out and poke around anyway,” she says to Chris, flashing a smile at him. “We’re already going to get in plenty of stomping around the woods.”

Chris doesn’t stiffen up, or flinch, or do anything but look resigned to her, like this is something they do all the time. When she pokes his boots again, the strap of her bag slips off her shoulder and he hooks it with his finger and drops it back in place without looking. “Yeah, well, I saw Erica and Isaac club-hopping last night, so I just wanted to check.”

“Never mind why _you_ were downtown that late,” Melissa teases. Then she gives him a pat on the shoulder and turns towards John. “All right, so Alan said your tests finished running, but he only sent that email at the crack of dawn, and I hope you weren’t waiting on it—”

“Nah, I wasn’t, but I didn’t get a chance to read it yet. I’ll look at it in the car,” John says, pushing his chair back.

Melissa catches the top of his chair and stops it in its tracks. “No, no, finish breakfast,” she says. She leans over John’s shoulder for a second and he thinks that might be her breast bumping his back, and he’s so busy doing his damnedest to _not_ be a dirty, disrespectful old man that she’s got him pushed back up to his plate before he can stop her. “I just checked the police channel, the ER reception, and the Internet, and nobody’s died. I think we can afford five more minutes for you to have the rest of those waffles.”

“Well, since you insist,” John says. Melissa is a very good-looking woman, and John’s been kind of short on adult company lately. But he is a professional, and even if he wasn’t, he was brought up to treat women as more than just potential girlfriends, so he picks up his knife and fork and stuffs his face, and thinks about man-eating plants with tentacles.

Thankfully, his dick only derails his brain for a couple seconds, and he looks back up again in time to catch the tail-end of what Melissa’s saying. “…fluffiest things ever, I used to swear by Eggos and now I can’t even stand to look at them. He’s spoiled me for them forever.”

“I really wasn’t trying,” Chris says. Now he looks a little embarrassed.

She’s talking about the waffles. “They’re good,” John says. He takes out his phone and finds that email from Deaton. Who was nice enough to cut-paste the table right into the body so John doesn’t have to download an attachment and then figure out where in the hell on his phone the damn thing ended up saving. “I’m more of a pancake guy—”

“Oh.” Chris shifts a little on his feet, his eyes almost flicking back towards the kitchen, like one, it’s anything to fix, and two, it’s got to be fixed now.

“—but these are good.” Because one, if anything needs to be fixed, it’s John who needs to do it, and two, John is not bad at fixing but he’s never claimed to be a wordsmith with compliments. “Stiles was saying everybody out here kept him stuffed to the gills, and I’m starting to see what he means.”

Melissa laughs, and then reaches over for Chris’ abandoned coffee. She immediately figures out who it belongs to and holds it up for Chris to take. “Well, what he was telling _me_ was that you missed eating something that didn’t come out of a microwave. And I noticed that Scott brought back an empty cooler.”

Those cookies had made for a tasty late-night snack, John remembers fondly. Though God knows he’ll probably have to double his number of laps if this keeps up. “Yeah, he’s not really exaggerating that one, unfortunately. I hate to admit it, but he kind of did the cooking after Claudia died, and when he got his own place I wasn’t any good at picking up where he left off.”

“You couldn’t get the cafeteria to send you something?” Melissa says. “It’s a university, isn’t it?”

“It is, but they aren’t twenty-four-seven. Kitchen’s really territorial, too, hates it when me or my team break in for a snack. Keeps complaining that we’re going to cross-contaminate and induce reversions in the ghoul students, like we don’t know how to handle the wards _we_ put on,” John mutters. And then winces as he realizes how crabby he sounds. “Anyway, I spend a lot on the vending machines.”

“Well, I don’t think you’ll need those here,” Melissa says. “Not today, at least. I wasn’t sure how long we’d be out there, so I brought another cooler—”

“I stuck water in the car, but I’ll see what I can dig out of the fridge, too,” Chris says, moving that way.

John winces again. “You know, it’s not like I demand feeding as part of helping you out. And if Stiles said something like that, you should ignore him.”

“Oh, he didn’t. We just want to make this easy for you,” Melissa says, beaming at John.

“Yeah, well…okay,” John says. He pauses, wondering why his paranoia’s tingling _now_ —it’s delicious, free, unpoisoned and unhexed food, for God’s sake—and then shrugs. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Chris says. “So, red cabbage slaw or roasted brussel sprouts with bacon?”

Oh, yeah. John’s taking some of that.

* * *

John spends the ride to the preserve looking over the test results. There aren’t that many of them, but they’re weird.

Well, the damn results are always weird, and some days John wishes he could go back in time and show off to his high school science teachers that yeah, look, he wasn’t an idiot, he actually can handle all that high-flying material so long as the person explaining it to him isn’t doing it with a sneer on their face and a bottle of rotgut in the bottom drawer. He’s never going to have the intuitive grasp that his son does, but he can find his way around a lab and figure out which tube is going to blow a hole in reality.

Usually.

“This is it,” Melissa says, standing at John’s shoulder. She and Chris give him a few minutes, and then she coughs into her hand. “John.”

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” John sticks his phone in his pocket and looks up.

He’s seen photos and video, and read through Stiles’ report—though no, he hasn’t gotten through all the footnotes, or the appendices, or the suggested reading list; he’s waiting for classes to start so he can get interns to do that for him—and so the way that the clearing looks doesn’t have any surprises for him. But it does have a funny feel.

It’s not just leftovers from Shub-Niggurath touching down. If anything, the place feels clean of that: no burnt patches, drifting leaves and birds flying over aren’t avoiding it, air isn’t icy and cold and it smells like a shady patch of forest, not like something that’s going to turn your head inside out and stick it on a tentacle-tip and use it for a puppet. No, it’s…it’s sort of like a cemetery. A normal one. It’s that feeling that even though it looks peaceful, it’s all artificial, and it’s made-up to cover a big hole somewhere. Something here has been _lost_ , that’s what it feels like, and even though life’s moved on, it’s still missed.

“We put those markers where we pulled up the little trees,” Chris says, pointing.

“Yeah, okay.” John walks up to the nearest of the markers—they’re simple iron rods, each with a small numbered tag hanging from it. The tag is also iron. “Metal?”

“Alan wasn’t sure if it would affect anything plant-based,” Melissa says.

Makes sense. John grunts something along those lines and then walks slowly around the clearing. A couple yards in, he catches himself and takes out his phone and starts scanning for Cthulhic traces. His team left sensors for that and he’s looked at the readouts and they’re clear, but it wouldn’t be the first time that a remote system has failed.

Except…his phone’s giving him the same result. He switches to a different app and puts on a more sensitive probe, and then tries again. Nothing.

“You look so much like Stiles right now,” Melissa says. When John looks up, she lifts her hand towards her mouth like she’s embarrassed, then drops it and straightens up. She’s still blushing a little bit, but she’s not going to hide, says her posture. “I’m sorry, but you do. He’s always talking out loud, but aside from that, you two really do get the same look on your face. I can’t believe that’s still the same.”

“Well, you can’t always tell from how he acts, but he remembers what he’s been taught,” John says. He rocks back on his feet, then reaches up and pulls at one shoulder. He hasn’t noticed till now, but he’s gotten all tense and his back is twinging again, probably leftover from getting crammed in a plane for six hours yesterday. “You still chew on the same nail.”

Melissa blinks, then lifts her left hand. Then shoves it into her pocket and gives him a weak glare. “I take that as a good sign,” she says, lifting her chin. “If I’m still just on that one, I’m doing pretty well handling things as they come.”

John laughs and then goes back to his phone, but not before he catches Chris watching them. He’s too experienced to do a double-take, and instead walks off a few paces, half-heartedly watching the app. Then he glances back.

Chris and Melissa are still standing where they were. They’re pretty close, but there’s still room between them for the two lunch coolers, and Chris has to lean to show Melissa his phone. He’s neither too aggressive nor too standoffish about it, and he doesn’t seem to be putting out the kind of effort that indicates he’s putting on a show. So…maybe John’s detective side is applying itself to the wrong mystery there. The two of them have been working together for a long time, in the kinds of situations that tend to breed familiarity.

“Hey,” Chris says when John circles back. He looks concerned, but about whatever he thinks John’s phone is reading. “Bad news?”

“No. More like no news,” John sighs. “With the tests we ran in the clinic, and what I was just looking at here, and all the stuff you sent me before. It’s all coming up negative—there are other tests we haven’t done yet, but look, there are always more tests.”

“Well, but if it’s a cost concern, we can work—and anyway, there’s obviously something going on,” Melissa says, in a very reasonable tone. “Plants don’t just grow tentacles and mouths.”

John sighs again. “I know. I’m not saying there isn’t something going on. I’m just saying it’s not showing up on the tests we’ve got for Cthulhic traces, and…and this isn’t scientific at all, but I’ve had way more to do with the Great Old Ones than I want to, and this just doesn’t feel like them to me. Not that I’m recommending we go on my gut, but for what it’s worth…”

“Going on your gut means a lot more in the supernatural world, at least in my experience,” Melissa says after a moment. She looks past John at the little sticks in the ground. “Even the plants we sent to you—”

“They’re still checking them over, but the fact that it’s taking them this long tells me they haven’t found anything yet,” John says. “Listen, I’m with you, I’m not comfortable declaring a clean bill of health. But on the other hand, everything I’ve got tells me that this _isn’t_ what it looks like.”

“Well, okay, but looking on the bright side, this means that we probably have more time to figure this out, since nothing’s active. And more time is always good,” Melissa says. She’s stepped forward and has her hands held out a little in front of her, making a calming motion, and she’s using that soothing tone John remembers from her nurse days, and did John get a little heated up there?

From the wary way Chris is watching him, John did. Damn. “Yeah. Yeah, true. You know what, I’m going to recalibrate the sensors we left here last time, and then run them overnight. Maybe it’s cyclical. Or…well, I’ll think on it.”

“Can’t ask for anything more than that,” Chris says. Then he reaches for the coolers at their feet. He’s moving slower than he needs to, and keeping his hands out, and goddamn it, but he’s trying just as hard as Melissa to not run up against John’s temper. “It’s just about time to eat, anyway.”

“Eat?” John says. “But we just…was I working that long?”

Melissa narrows her eyes at him, and then puts her hand over them. “ _Just_ like Stiles,” she says, and then she reaches out and grabs him by the arm. “Yes, you were, and yes, we’re having lunch now.”

“You’re still bossy, too,” John can’t help saying.

“Well, you still need a push or two, and I don’t see anyone else around for that,” Melissa says, dragging him away from the clearing, with Chris toting the coolers after them.

* * *

Once he’s gotten some food into him, John feels better. He still has no idea what’s going on, but he’s getting a few about how to go about making it explain itself.

He also has a sneaking suspicion that that’s because, well, he’s picnicking in the woods with Melissa and Chris, and he’s both enjoying it a lot and embarrassed about it, and working for Miskatonic has gotten him so used to lurching from disaster to disaster that he needs to be running from something to figure out the other thing out. He’s a grown man and he should be able to face up to himself by now, but…it’s why he’s enjoying it. It’s fun to watch them.

They’ve been keeping the conversation away from all things Cthulhu, and instead have been filling him in about other threats Beacon Hills has seen come and go. It started out with Chris mentioning the first time he’d come to town, which had been before John and his family had moved away, and John had honestly never thought to ask before about just _what_ he’d missed before he’d wised up to the supernatural. Chris had been reluctant to tell him, but then Melissa had started needling him, and John had made it clear that he’s plain curious, not defensive. He knows there’s a whole supernatural world out there he misses because of his job focus, but Miskatonic’s got a diverse enough student body that he gets flickers.

So Chris starts talking, and Melissa keeps needling him. But he needles her right back, and it’s the first time John has really spent with them not focused on the work. And he remembers Melissa had a wicked sense of humor, but he doesn’t think she was this confident about herself before and it’s a great look on her. Chris he never knew—Chris says they ran into each other briefly, but John’s embarrassed to say he’s completely forgotten that case—so he’s coming fresh to the man and Chris doesn’t need to unbend his straight face to make Melissa break into peals of laughter. And if the two of them aren’t at least doing each other’s laundry, John’s secretly a Mi-Go from Yuggoth.

They’re a cute couple, John thinks, and yeah, he’s wistful. His job actually ensures he could never be a hermit—he’s constantly having to go out and meet with people as steeped in the supernatural as they all are. But he never gets to meet people who seem to be able to just push that off and have a life the way they’re doing right in front of him.

When lunch wraps, Melissa excuses herself to go to her meetings. “But I’ll be over for dinner if you find something before then, and you’ve got my cell if it’s an emergency,” she says. She pauses on her way to standing. “And if you need to sit down and think about something else, text me for that too. I think Chris was planning to cook but we can always take you out.”

John laughs, but waves her off. “Thanks, but I’m pretty sure you’ve got better things to do than to just cater to me while I’m sitting on my ass.”

“In that case, I could always bring _my_ caseload over, and get some grumbling off my chest,” Melissa says. She’s half-serious, though he can tell she’s not expecting him to say yes.

“Hey, well, I used to do that sort of thing,” John says. “Sure.”

Melissa falters for a second. Then she gives him the same wave-off, before lightly smacking his shoulder as she retrieves her bag. She’s a bit more free with the gesturing than before, but that’s probably down to cutting Rafael loose. “Just like I used to do the nursing thing, I’m guessing,” she says dryly. “Well, Chris, you’ll—”

“Yeah, I get anything, I’ll flip it to you,” Chris says, busy packing Tupperware into the cooler.

John takes that over so Chris can walk Melissa to the road where Scott’s picking her up. It doesn’t take long, and by the time Chris comes back, John’s sat with the coolers for enough time that he’s gotten up, grabbed one of the sensors and come back with it to reprogram it.

“If you need a desk, I can probably rig you up something better,” Chris says, eyeing the way John’s squatting down in front of his laptop, which is on top of one cooler. “I’d say you could sit in the car, but I guess you would’ve done that if you wanted to do that.”

“Oh, shit, right, I’m sorry about that,” John says, looking up. He’d meant to get it done and his bag back in the car before Chris came back and, well, realized John can work the locking spells on the door. “Just had an idea about how to get started, but that was rude.”

Chris shrugs and seems entirely unconcerned about having his security circumvented. “That’s why we asked you to come out again. Can I—”

“No, I’m all right, I’m just finishing up with this anyway,” John says, getting up with his laptop balanced across his forearm.

He reaches down to get the sensor and his phone, but then has to grab at the laptop to keep it from tipping off. But the wires connecting the sensor and the laptop swing around and John mistakenly thinks they’re about to drag his phone to the ground, so he makes a grab at that and nearly loses his hold on everything.

The reason why is he doesn’t is Chris gets the laptop in one hand and then snatches up a loop of wire in the other, allowing John to pin the sensor to the laptop and just slip his phone back into his pocket where it belongs. John sighs, knowing he’s red in the face, and gives Chris a nod of thanks. “The system’s reset, I just need to put this back and do a test run, and then we can leave it to go overnight.”

“Okay,” Chris says. He gives John back the laptop and then steps politely out of the way as John packs that up. “You need to head to the clinic after that?”

“What, did you guys get in something?” John says.

Chris blinks. “No. Just…not sure what’s left to do. Didn’t know if you needed to redo things with the samples, too.”

“Oh. No, no, for those, unless they change, I think I want to wait on what the botany people back at Miskatonic have to say. They’re supposed to check in with me every afternoon—that’s our time here, end of day for them there,” John says. Then he makes a face. “Well. It’s supposed to be end of day for them. We just reshuffled people in building security, I’m still on the shelf about how good they are kicking people out when the labs are supposed to close.”

“Okay, we’re working to your schedule, after all,” Chris says, shrugging again. “Till somebody’s in danger, but doesn’t look like it so far. So did you want me to take you back to the house, or did you need to go into town at all?”

Back to the house is the prudent answer. John doesn’t actually have anything he can do there on this project, but he’s always got something going on at Miskatonic. His phone hasn’t tried to wiggle out of his pocket yet today, so nobody there has ended up dead or in psych containment, but he probably has a couple professors bugging him to hurry up approval on security variances, or some alumnus who’s messed up somewhere and looking for the University to help him clean it up. Not to mention his son’s back in town, werewolf boyfriend in tow, and it’s been awfully quiet from Stiles’ corner. So he really should go back, log in, and spend a couple hours trying not to permanently curse somebody’s email.

“I don’t need to go into town for anything, but if you’re going there anyway, I might catch a ride and walk around and see what’s different,” is what John ends up saying. Feeling like he’s ten again and playing hooky to go fishing with his grandfather, but honestly, that’s pretty much all worry that he’ll get caught out. There’s not much guilt and he really should schedule a real vacation soon; he’s edging towards burnout if he’s thinking like that. “I didn’t really get much of a look last time.”

“Yeah, you mostly were out at night,” Chris agrees, with an absent look on his face. He checks something on his phone, then walks a yard over to his car and pulls open the back. “Well, I was planning on going on a supply run, but that doesn’t really take us towards the downtown. Though if I just swung over onto—”

“Look, I don’t want to send you out of your way,” John says. “I just…I think I’ve got a couple fresh ideas about how to deal with this, but I need to mull them over some more, and was thinking it’d be nice if I didn’t have to do it indoors.”

“Oh. Well, you could just come with me,” Chris says after a second. “Nothing glamorous, hardware and some hunting supplies, but I could use another hand.”

“Actually, that’d work just fine,” John says.

Half an hour later, they’re standing in the aisles of the local outdoor gear store and John’s pushing a cart full of rope, survival rations, and various types of gun cleaners while Chris ponders a display of bear spray. “They redesigned the damn can,” he says. “Not sturdy enough now for the weres, they keep crushing it.”

“Their smell alone doesn’t scare off the wildlife?” John says.

“Oh, it’s not for that, it’s for taking down omegas,” Chris explains. He checks on where the store assistants are, then goes on. “We were getting too many people calling in reports about gunshots or wild animal fights, and Melissa and I were worried about the state sending down people, or maybe even the feds. We tried giving the pack tasers, but they never remembered to keep them charged up and just ended up using them like hammers, and we were spending a fortune to replace them.”

John nods thoughtfully. “I should test that, come to think of it.”

“Against Cthulhic entities?” Chris says, blinking.

“Nah, isn’t gonna work, but their cultists, it just might,” John says. He pulls out his phone and snaps a picture of the spray to remind himself. “Sometimes you don’t have time to hex them all, and if you shoot them, you never know if they’ll just blow up goo in your face. You wouldn’t believe the percentage of my budget that’s dedicated to dry cleaning.”

“I don’t know, I think I can guess,” Chris says, very dryly, though the corners of his mouth are turned up. He finally grabs a couple cans of spray, muttering that maybe he can figure out a reinforced sleeve for them. Then he pulls up short. “Oh—look, do you mind if we make one more stop? I promised Melissa I’d pick up her dry-cleaning, now that you mention it.”

John shakes his head, but he can’t help watching the other man as Chris walks them to the cash register for checkout. Chris had said that very matter-of-factly, without that awkward glance most people would do when first introducing their…whatever he and Melissa are. If they’re so public and so longstanding that they’re used to everybody knowing, then that makes sense—but Stiles hadn’t said a thing, and Stiles likes Melissa a lot, always did. There’s no way he kept his mouth shut and _didn’t_ haze the hell out of Chris, except that somehow, he doesn’t know.

“Nice of you,” John says. “I can’t get my stuff delivered back to my house, it goes to my office. I shouldn’t complain, I get it for free through the university, but the number of times I’ve needed a suit and realized I had to go back to campus to get a clean one…”

“Yeah, well, it’s only fair,” Chris shrugs. “The way our work schedules are, she’s been getting most of my groceries since Allison moved in with Scott.”

“You guys trade off weekends with the kids, too?” John asks, before remembering Scott and Allison have their own place.

Both Chris and the cashier, who’s just scanning the rope, look oddly at him. John bites back a grimace and just makes his face as bland as possible, waiting till after Chris has gotten the receipt and they’re walking out into the parking lot.

“Sorry,” John says. “I made that sound…off. When it’s none of my business, really.”

“It’s fine,” Chris says. He pulls out his keys and beeps his car to unlock the doors, and then pulls up the cart at the back. “We just try not to talk about it much in town because her ex-husband still knows people here, and they pass gossip on, and she hates dealing with him.”

“ _That’s_ the problem?” John says. Then grimaces again. Maybe he should go back and clean out his inbox just to keep his foot out of his mouth. “Sorry. Maybe I’ve been in Arkham too long, but…that’s what the town talks about? Not the dead bodies, or all the things you guys save them from?”

Chris doesn’t say anything, but the weary little shrug he gives John as he stows his shopping bags is eloquent enough.

“Yeah, well, I really never understood why people liked that man. Rafael was, and as far as I’ve heard, is still an unreliable asshole,” John mutters. “You know, if any of that’s because he’s with the FBI and still abusing that badge of his, I’m happy to reach out to my contacts there. It wouldn’t even be doing you a favor. I still owe him for a couple times he scared Claudia over Stiles.”

For a second Chris looks like he might gladly take John up on that, but then he sighs and shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’d make that offer to Melissa,” he says. “He’s her business and yeah, he does overstep, so that’s one reason why I try not to.”

John helps with the last few bags and then they get back into the car. He probably should leave it at that, but thinking about Rafael always pisses him off—Stiles was never what you’d call a _quiet_ kid, but it takes some kind of dick to stick a little kid in an interrogation room—and on top of that, Chris is being so damn calm about it. Honestly, what John’s seen of Chris’ record, he probably could have Rafael quietly sunk into a grave somewhere, but instead he’s just putting up with it and he must really be in pretty far with Melissa, to swallow that much.

“Well, she does mean a lot to me, but it’s really more about respecting what’s hers,” Chris says, alerting John to the fact that he’s been rambling some of that aloud. For that matter, Chris is being pretty calm about John’s string of social gaffes. “Look, we’re involved but I should probably say now that we’re not—not exclusive. It’s not like that.”

A couple minutes go by. They pull out of the parking lot and up to the nearest intersection. “Okay,” John says. He jiggles his leg and glances over and notices how Chris’ calm has gone quietly but clearly rigid. “Sure. That’s…however you want to handle it, it’s not like I’m in any position to judge. I…well, I have people on my staff who are really aliens who have four different sexes and who reproduce in gas clouds. I just figure if it works for you, great.”

Chris relaxes, and a second later he even cracks a smile. “I don’t know about the four different sexes and the gas clouds, but the old hunter families do have some pretty strange traditions. And I guess I couldn’t shake off all of that.”

He gets a little wistful there, not quite sad but not quite happy either. Still, he doesn’t seem as if he needs a rescue from anything, and if he does, John doesn’t think it’ll be from Melissa. 

“You two do seem to have things down, however that is. Must be nice, having someb—that,” John says after a second. He can feel Chris looking at him, and he shakes off his momentary irritation at it and just sighs. “I’m not going to be the asshole boss who makes his subordinates get his dry cleaning for him, but on the other hand, can’t get anybody else to even do that without risking them running off screaming when they see what I do. And my kid’s moving soon, I think.”

“Really?” Chris says.

“Well, he should. He needs a bigger pond. Deserves it.” John shrugs. “Me, I’m old, I guess I’m just okay getting the basics covered these days. I’ll be all right, I just worry about him.”

Chris makes a thoughtful kind of noise. It’s…a little drawn-out, but when John looks over, Chris is leaning forward in his seat, trying to gauge traffic for a left turn into the dry cleaner’s, so that’s probably it. “All right, but let me know if we can do anything,” Chris says, still looking out the window. “No need to settle for just basics when you’re here, anyway.” 

“Yeah, sure,” John says. “Sure. I’ll let you know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lovecraft's ghouls are a separate species, but the whole changeling part of it suggests that ghouls can make their babies pass as human. In _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_ , another monster species he invented, the Deep Ones, can interbreed with humans, and while the offspring start out looking human, they gradually revert to Deep One over time (or if prematurely triggered).
> 
> Bear spray uses the same chemical that makes hot peppers feel as if they're burning your eyes and tongue. I don't see why it wouldn't work on werewolves, too; it's not a poison the way alcohol is, it's just something that triggers certain sensory cells in your body.
> 
> Scott's dad's treatment of Scott, Stiles and Allison during his initial investigation is a particularly egregious example of Hollywood Law, and if a real FBI agent did the stuff he did, he'd basically have no evidence to prosecute the case with, because these are the kind of people who can afford good legal representation and who'd think to hire it, and any info Rafael gathered would all be thrown out by the judge for civil rights violations. He'd also probably lose his job and get his ass sued off by the families in civil court for things like false imprisonment and threatening a minor.
> 
> John's referencing the Mi-Go with reproducing in a gas cloud; I'm partly referencing them as interpreted by Nick Mamatas in his short story _Dead Media_.


	5. Chapter 5

Peter fixes the screen door. He strips and replaces wallpaper. He unwarps floorboards and scrubs grout and oils window rails, and does that on only fifty percent lung capacity because sadly, protective masks don’t filter out the smell and the house’s hidden nooks and crannies contain pockets of the most repellently fragrant, clingingly putrid _residue_ Peter has ever encountered. Calling it dust would be whitewashing of the highest degree.

“Well, but the place looks shiny as hell now,” Stiles says, as he and Peter sit on the couch after dinner, watching TV. “It definitely didn’t look this nice when I first moved in. I think it even looks cleaner than after my dad’s team went through it.”

“Does he do that for everywhere you live?” Peter mumbles. To be honest, Stiles is sitting. Peter is leaning on him, head lumped on Stiles’ shoulder, and shamelessly using the arm Stiles has around his waist to keep him from sliding down onto the floor. The damned house has exhausted even his werewolf strength—for that matter, he thinks the skin on his hands might be peeling, and it isn’t immediately regenerating.

Peter shudders and then snarls to himself, jerking one hand down against his knee and then rubbing hard. The smell in his nose now, burnt but sickly sweet, a stomach-turning roasted fat, he knows that’s entirely in his head. And he knows better than to pay it any mind, but it still takes the smell a damnably long time to fade.

“…happen there?” Stiles is saying. He twists around, pulling himself back into the corner of the sofa so he can face Peter. “You were opening enough windows, weren’t you? I told you, those cleaners are pretty potent and that should hold even for were—”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Peter says snappishly. He looks at his hands and his lip curls silently when he sees the skin isn’t splitting at all. Perhaps a little pinker than usual…but perhaps he should stop rubbing them against himself. And do something before Stiles storms off on him. “Stiles, I…”

“You all right?” Stiles says, frowning. There’s some annoyance in his scent, but mostly, he’s confused. And worried. “You looked like you had a little fit there.”

Peter experiences a sharp, pressing urge to exit the situation. Half a dozen smart remarks that’d allow him to do that spring to mind, and even though his eyes stay on Stiles, his other senses are busy assessing various routes out of the room. Which is typically how he handles this.

But as soon as the urge comes, a strange, recurring wave of calm starts to smooth it over. Rather like the tide nibbling at the sand, washing over him again and again, and as Peter thinks on that, he realizes he’s fixed onto a heartbeat. “Fit?” he says.

“Yeah, you, uh, you spasmed a little,” Stiles says, holding up one hand and twitching its fingers. “And then you made this noise and don’t get offended, okay, but Allison was wondering if any of the Dreamland stuff I know would help her tweak Scott’s nightmare wards, so I’ve been listening to tapes of his, uh, his dream noises, and it was kind of like that.”

Not his heartbeat either. Of course Peter’s already decided the man is worth denning up for, so it’s not surprising at all. Shouldn’t be. “I…was reminded of something that’d happened to me,” he says after a second. He presses his lips together, and then takes a breath. “After the fire, when I was healing. It wasn’t a hallucination, just a memory. It doesn’t happen that often.”

Stiles nods soberly. He’s looked up Peter and his family, and the way he dances around the subject of the fire tells Peter he’s rather more educated on the details than Scott is, but when it comes up he generally lets Peter decide how much to discuss. And right now, as willing as Stiles seems to be, Peter doesn’t want to go any further than that.

“Okay,” Stiles says. He eases out of the corner and moves his arm as if he’ll put it around Peter again. Then he frowns and pulls back again. “Okay. So, not to press on the memory itself, but I just—I want to make sure—was it a logical reminder? I mean, an actual trigger you can pinpoint and avoid? Or was it totally out of the blue? I’m not trying to be a jerk, it’s just the house, um. I want to make sure it’s not that.”

“The former,” Peter says slowly. That hadn’t even occurred to him, and if _that_ is the case…well, he tells himself he and Stiles have just put in a full day’s worth of work into improving the place, and it would not only be petty but counterproductive if he tore that down now. “I think I’m just tired.”

Stiles winces. Then he pulls up his legs and kneels on the couch, maneuvering himself so that he’s behind Peter. “Yeah, well, not sleeping all night will do that to you,” he says, as he starts kneading down Peter’s shoulders. “And I know I was ditching you a lot today, too, so you were doing all the work.”

“Well, better that than having one of your professors—mmm, a little left—come invading,” Peter says. He rolls his head over to give Stiles better access and Stiles obligingly bears down on that knotted muscle, and within the minute, Peter’s ended up face-down on the couch with the other man straddling his waist, doing something very pleasurable to Peter’s back with the heels of his hands. “You did get them straightened out?”

“Oh, yeah. Whateley, anyway, and I managed to push off the Brichester people, but when Dad comes back I’ll have to sit down with them,” Stiles says, working up under Peter’s shirt. His hands are a little chilly and after Peter twitches, he blows on them and then just holds them against Peter’s shoulderblades for a few seconds. “They’re sending somebody to meet with him and if they’re in town, I can’t really say I’m unavailable.”

Peter snorts into the cushions. “No?”

“Okay, I know I put up a good asshole-may-care show, but academic reality is you can’t piss off everybody or else they’ll stick excerpts of _The King in Yellow_ into the next paper they ask you to review,” Stiles says, with a little mock-reprimanding scratch at Peter’s shoulders. When Peter shivers and spreads his hands in surrender, Stiles laughs and then presses one hand up over Peter’s nape, rocking it there as he walks his other one down along Peter’s spine. “Brichester’s not bad, either, aside from the whole gotta move to England thing. I wouldn’t mind getting out of Arkham but I don’t know that I want to go that far. Also, they’re way more in bed with the druids, and I know you don’t like them.”

“Druids?” Peter says. He’s not surprised about Stiles thinking he dislikes them—the correct word is he hates them, with a grudging exception for Alan Deaton—but that the man is even factoring that in. “Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean I won’t take— _mmm_ , oh, that’s good—take the odd bit of useful—and you wouldn’t be turning into one, would you?”

“Nah. I think Greek life around here’s basically cured me of any desire to join some secret brotherhood. I mean, if I want to go drinking with a chance of cosmic evil, I don’t need to pay dues to get that.” Stiles shifts himself higher up Peter’s waist, just as he works his hands down Peter’s sides. His fingertips brush dangerously near Peter’s nipples and Peter shivers in anticipation, which in turn cants Stiles’ hips briefly forward to push a distinct bulge into Peter’s back. “Um.”

Peter sniffs, then chuckles at the embarrassment mixing into Stiles’ arousal. “Mmm, yes? Did you need something?”

“You know, it’s not really me being a healthy young man so much as those noises you make,” Stiles says, a touch irritably. “They’re not obscene. They’re like obscenity took a spin in a centrifuge and skimmed off all the redeeming artistic value.”

Peter snorts again, and then twists sharply under the other man. He gets a delicious glimpse of Stiles’ wild, wide eyes before they flip places and he ducks his head under the upflung hem of Stiles’ shirt. Stiles’ hands clamp onto his shoulders just as he presses his lips to the man’s breastbone.

“All right, all right, I’m listening,” Peter says. Letting his lower lip drag and stick to Stiles’ skin, nudging back and forth as he talks. His hands, he drops to Stiles’ hips, shaping the loose jeans to the sweetly lean body within, before smoothing them up to start undoing Stiles’ fly. “Where are you, exactly? Would you like to talk through your options again?”

“Um, yeah, that might—oh, Jesus—help, but—seriously, Peter, do you—do you want to _talk_?” Stiles gasps. Squirming and clutching at Peter’s shoulders. Twisting up expensive cotton, probably stretching it out beyond repair, especially when Peter nibbles at the slight groove between the pectorals. “Are you actually listening?”

Just before Peter raises his head, he takes a long, firm lick at Stiles, tasting the start of sweat pearling out of Stiles’ skin. Stiles hisses and rocks against the couch, then jerks his hand up so Peter lifts his nape into its grip. The squeeze of his fingers makes Peter dip on instinct, pressing them together from the feet up to nearly the waist, his own growing erection digging into Stiles’ thigh. His chin tips up and Stiles’ breath pools under it, petting at his throat, and he does think very strongly about answering in the negative.

But, with an effort, Peter pulls his head down and looks the other man in the eye. “Always,” he says. He watches the way Stiles’ eyes observe and consider and then warm, and then smiles as he teases the bare skin just above Stiles’ loosened waistband. “So it’s entirely up to you. If you need to—”

“You jerk,” Stiles says, yelping and twisting. He yanks Peter’s head down and back under his shirt, and then seems surprised when Peter promptly resumes kissing and licking. “Well…okay, sure, you just—just have fun there, but I kind of—yeah, people obviously know I’m back, I should come up with a damn game plan, or else they’re gonna—gonna stampede—I come up with _shit_ metaphors when you’re doing that, Peter.”

Peter pulls himself up from just below Stiles’ bellybutton, with his hands having just pushed Stiles’ clothes out of the way. “I’m sorry, what should I be doing to fix your metaphors?”

Stiles makes an inarticulate, but still very distinctly outraged, noise. Then he grabs Peter’s head with both hands and well, Peter did ask for instruction. It would be hypocritical of him not to take it.

Though once he’s sucked Stiles off, he does try to resume the conversation. He was serious when he made his offer to listen, and per its terms, it’s entirely up to Stiles that Stiles seems to feel the best way to talk over his graduate prospects is with them squashed on their sides on the couch, him behind Peter, one hand stroking all over Peter’s belly while the other fingers Peter at a brutally casual pace.

“Dad really thinks I should get out of here and see more of the world, and he’s not wrong. I mean, you look at the old-timers at Miskatonic and on the one hand, kudos to them for sticking it out, right? But on the other…things worse than death and all that,” Stiles sighs. He mouths at Peter’s nape a little, his fingers crooked inside Peter to work around the sensitive prostate, and then digs his hands into Peter’s stomach when Peter moans and hitches against him. “And on the other, _other_ hand, if I don’t want to just be doing backwater stuff, not really a lot of options besides Miskatonic. Unless I want to go private industry.”

Peter moans again, pushing down on Stiles’ scissoring fingers. This time when Stiles scratches him, he rides up into it, then gets his hand up over the hand Stiles has on his belly to press it down harder. “But you said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, way higher death rate, people never seem to get that cosmic evil does not work on your capitalist timeline, ROI means nothing to aeons-old beings,” Stiles mutters. He lets Peter work their hands over Peter’s abs for a few seconds, then bites Peter on the nape and, while Peter’s whining from that, bats himself free. “So no to that, and Dad and me have yelled at so many government guys, even if they didn’t hold that against me, I don’t think I trust them to do what I tell them. Which means government’s out too, and back to grad school. Brichester’s really far, so is Asia, and all the East Coast places are joint with Miskatonic anyway, so I might as well stay on the side with leverage and okay, okay, hang on.”

His hand leaves Peter’s belly so Peter, bereft, rolls after it, only to be pulled up deliciously short by Stiles’ fingers hooked into him. Peter groans and humps himself backwards, throwing his head back as a knuckle pushes up against his perineum, catching him in a vise that’s forcing the pleasure roiling his body to a jagged, blinding peak—and then Stiles brings his slicked-up hand back, wrapping it with perfect tightness around Peter’s cock. Peter almost doesn’t want to come, that moment teetering at the very top, feeling nothing but sensation, is so glorious.

“…so, if it’s Miskatonic, I guess realistically, my choices are Lydia or Whipple,” Stiles says. He prods the back of Peter’s neck with his chin.

“Mmm, yes, the harpy or the elderly wannabe Tesla,” Peter murmurs.

“Oh, my God, how did Lyds not eat you alive before we met,” Stiles says, but he’s more amused than scandalized. “Also, I see supernatural intra-discrimination is alive and well.”

“All right, I take that back. It’s an insult to harpies, who are just carrying out orders, after all.” Peter smiles as Stiles muffles his laughter into Peter’s back, then looks down at where their hands are loosely twisted together. “Well, whichever you choose, rest assured that I stand willing and ready to police any boundaries you set.”

“Yeah.” At first Stiles makes that sound like more of a question, with an uncertain lift at the end. But then he pulls in tighter against Peter, curling his fingers against Peter’s belly. “Yeah, because you’re _so_ good at that.”

“Thieves to catch thieves,” Peter says.

“Jerk,” Stiles says. He nuzzles at Peter’s nape a little longer, then makes a small, pained noise. “Well, um, I did not buy this couch for extended cuddle periods, I gotta say. And it looks like maybe we fixed the whole ejection thing, so…you wanna move this to the bedroom, see how the rat noises are shaping up?”

“It’d be my pleasure,” Peter purrs.

* * *

It takes a while for them to effectively test the rat noises, since, being curious, Stiles wants to know the result immediately and so he has trouble relaxing enough to fall asleep and properly recreate the situation. Peter finally gives him another blowjob, and even then, he’s mumbling about maybe fixing up the basement next right up to the moment his heartbeat finally slows.

His fussing distracts Peter, and several minutes pass before Peter slowly realizes that it is, in fact, quiet in the bedroom. Peter tenses up, expecting the noises to start then, but…they don’t.

Still wary, Peter eases off the bed—a pleased warmth and then a strange pinch go through his chest when Stiles flops an arm over him—and pads around the room to check. Then he goes out into the living room. Nothing.

Peter returns to the bedroom and crawls in besides Stiles. He lets Stiles curl up around him, but as tired as he is, he’s too alert to drift off himself. It’s still quiet, but it’s not silent—the house is very old, and has all of the small creaks and pops you’d expect, and every time Peter hears one, he finds himself straining to hear whether it’s followed by the sound of skittering feet.

Stiles shifts against him, sliding the blankets up their bodies. His forehead bumps at Peter’s chin, and when Peter moves out of the way, he slumps forward to partly lie across Peter, his arm falling to nudge Peter’s head towards his shoulder. For a moment Peter resists because that will interfere with his hearing and—then, sighing at himself, Peter stops that idiocy and puts his head down, and…goes to sleep.

He drops off quickly, and he has the impression that for a good while he has a nice, peaceful rest. And then he starts dreaming.

Peter’s proud but he’s no fool, and as soon as he’d recovered enough from the fire to communicate, he’d asked for nightmare wards. As soon as he’d recovered enough to do magic, he’d torn down the ones Laura had gotten from Deaton—whatever else they fight over, she’s never called Peter weak for needing help for that—and done his own, and he’s been using them ever since. So he’s very aware that he’s dreaming, and that the dream is wrong.

He’s still in the bedroom and so is Stiles—and so is a third presence. Malevolent beyond a doubt, just out of sight in the darkness, but creeping closer from another angle every time Peter turns towards it. He pulls himself up over the sleeping Stiles and snarls at it, turns monster himself, but the thing is mist and cold, always dissolving to nothing in his claws and leaving only a lingering, growing chilly weakness in him.

His life is slowly fading, being drawn out into the thing, and the more he fights, the stronger it pulls at him. It’s like the werewolf trick drawing pain reversed, and in spite of himself Peter starts to panic, raising his hands to rake and slash, and then there’s an icy _stab_ into the back of his neck—

Peter wakes, sitting straight up in bed beside Stiles, the fading echoes of a coarse, malicious mutter in his ears. He reaches up and wipes at his neck, but all that comes off on his fingers is a clammy sweat.

Well, he’s warm enough by the time he stalks out of bed, so angry that he barely remembers to keep his steps soft to not wake Stiles. That voice had been speaking _French_ , and between that and the strike at his nape—he goes into the living room, snatches up the toolkit and the leftover hardware supplies, and prepares to put an end to this.

The basement access is through another door in the hall, which wants to swing shut on its own. Peter thinks about it, then takes out a nail and, with a quick slam of the heel of his hand, pins the door open. Then he goes downstairs to finish what he’s started.

The railing is coming off the wall, so Peter screws it back on. Two of the steps have split around their nails, so Peter wraps metal strips around them and then sands down the splinters. Plaster has come off in chunks from the walls, leaving holes that Peter spackles over. He caulks around leaky windows and chips up dust that’s layered so thickly it’s begun to petrify. He scours off mold and slime till the place looks just dank, and not like a fungoid playground.

One corner, and one corner only, appears to be covered in linoleum, but it’s been haphazardly done and the undermat is obviously rotting, the gases pushing the fake tiles up into bulges. Peter works at the edge with his claws, and then, when he has enough to grip, he just rips up the whole thing.

He doesn’t have replacement linoleum, but he intends to at least scrape up whatever’s collected underneath it and clean the space so it’ll be ready for a fresh installation. But what comes up is a flurry of white particles that make Peter sneeze violently—mold spores, he thinks, but his head is suddenly spinning, and that voice is muttering again, that damned _French_ , and there are faces looking at him and he growls at them and will murder them all if he has to and—

Peter is face-up on the lawn, with his nephew crouched panting over him, while inside, Stiles wakes up and then calls out his name in a worried voice. “What the hell is _wrong_ with you?” Derek demands.

For some reason, Peter can’t move to hit him.

* * *

Thankfully for all involved, the paralysis is brief and is well over by the time Stiles runs out of the house and comes yelling towards them. Stiles doesn’t recognize Derek in the dark, and Derek always forgets things like that, and Peter needs all four of his limbs and his voice to keep them from damaging each other.

Although Peter’s tempted to rescind Derek’s protection, considering how surly the man is being, even by his standards. “I was just going to check into a hotel anyway, and you sounded off,” Derek says. “So what, I drove over to check.”

“You have Stiles’ number,” Peter points out.

“Um,” Stiles says, pulling out his phone. “So he—”

“Yeah, so I called him, but the line was busy, and okay, maybe I could’ve tried more than twice, but the last time you sounded like that, we ended up with vampires, so excuse me for caring,” Derek snaps. He rakes his hand through his hair, then jabs it at the window. “And you know, that looked—well, not like those vamps, but it sure as hell looked like it was sucking _something_ out of you, so are you really going to keep yelling at me?”

Peter is tempted. Sorely. But instead he just presses his hands over his face and takes a few deep breaths. His nephew does have a point, he has to admit. His healing is catching up, but he still feels colder than he should, and the scratches from Derek pulling him through the broken window are still showing as white lines on his skin.

“Hey,” Stiles says. When Peter looks up, Stiles is holding out a cup of coffee to him as if it’s a lifeline for _Stiles_. The way Stiles’ shoulders slump in relief as Peter takes it makes Peter wish very badly that they were alone. “I’m so sorry. That one hasn’t come up in fifty years, but the seal _was_ getting ratty, I probably should’ve—”

Derek straightens up and turns towards him. Then, to his credit, Derek listens to Peter’s subvocal growl and flinches away. While turning a surprised, vaguely hurt look on Peter, but Peter does not have time for his nephew’s issues right now. “If that was that piece of linoleum, I pulled it up,” Peter says.

Stiles stutters once, then stops and stares at Peter for a few seconds. He opens his mouth, then closes it, rubbing absently at the top of his head. Then he shakes himself. “You…pulled it up? Um. Okay. We—we have—there are sigils drawn all over it—”

“I don’t doubt that they’re still there, but I wasn’t paying attention to that sort of thing,” Peter admits. He looks at his coffee. “I—believe the house sent me a dream. A nightmare, and I thought if I did some more renovations, I’d…anyway, I should have looked for that. I know better, but I was…I was upset.”

“Right,” Stiles says after a second. A trace of irritation comes and goes in his scent, but mostly that’s full of worry and confusion. “Right. Okay. Nightmare. So—so we’re going to talk about that, but for now, I think—I think we should put the home improvement on hold. And maybe get a hotel room for you—”

“No,” Peter says. The sharpness of his tone makes Stiles start and he nearly breaks the mug trying to control himself and not spook the other man further. “Stiles, I know I was careless, but I’m aware now and I—I don’t want to just leave this all on you. This is all for my benefit, after all, and I promise I won’t do anything more without asking you first. But I want to help.”

Derek makes a noise, but then has a flash of sense and just stares blankly back at Stiles when Stiles looks at him, pretending as if it’d never happened. Stiles presses his lips together, rocking on his feet, and looks at Peter again. He doesn’t look very sure, but he does seem reluctant to protest.

“I came here because I wanted to get to know your life the way you’ve done with mine,” Peter presses. “Please, Stiles. I got ahead of myself, but—”

“Yeah. Yeah, look, I…you didn’t look good, Peter, you really didn’t, but I—” Stiles wavers, glancing between him and the door “—look, I’m gonna reseal the basement floor and then we’ll talk, okay? I can’t think this through with that on my mind.”

“You need somebody with you?” Derek asks then. He looks irritated at how surprised both Stiles and Peter are. “I don’t know the magic stuff, but obviously, I know how to drag somebody out of the way.”

“Well, I appreciate the offer, but I can ward it off,” Stiles says after a second. He takes a step away, glancing at Peter. Then he shakes himself sharply. He goes into the library and comes back out carrying a book and a small leather bag. “I redo the seal every six months, and anyway, this thing tends to get you when you’re distracted and I won’t be. But I guess just in case, if I’m not up in fifteen minutes, come down. I should be up in ten.”

“Noted,” Peter says.

Stiles looks at him. The man nearly says something, then bites his lip and just turns around and goes out the door. Peter waits till Stiles is gone and then rubs his hands over his face again, wondering just how much more can go wrong.

“I don’t think you’re okay,” Derek says.

“Well, I’m not leaving him to a soul-sucking house,” Peter hisses. He pulls his hand down and looks at one of the fading scratches on it. Pushes at it, then watches the resulting bruise immediately fade. He’s healthy and in his prime now, he reminds himself. “Derek. I appreciate the concern. But Stiles and I have been working on this already, and while I might have had a slight misstep, I have this under control and expect to settle it soon.”

“Peter, his house just tried to eat you,” Derek says. He stares expectantly at Peter for a second, then lets out a sharp, irritated exclamation when Peter doesn’t give him whatever response he’s trying to telepathically push into Peter’s mind. “His house. Tried to _eat you_. Just what part of that is ‘under control’?”

Sometimes, Peter admits, he’d like to murder his family. He doesn’t find this hypocritical in the least; the Argents and hunters like them are deservedly condemned for targeting packs for the simple reason that they’re werewolves, whereas when Peter gets homicidal urges towards his blood relations, it’s because he _lives_ with them.

“So what do you suggest, exactly?” Peter snaps at his nephew. “Letting the house win?”

Derek stares at Peter again. Then he exhales in annoyance and drops his face into his hand, massaging around his baffled grimace. “Okay. Look. Just—why were you fixing it up, anyway? Since when do you do DIY?”

“First of all, since I realized that your sister neither could pick a decent contractor to save our lives—literally—nor could she, or you, for that matter, bother to remember to turn off the power before you started working. And secondly, because I do not, in fact, enjoy being eaten by a house, and I was trying to prevent that,” Peter says. Halfway through he hears a noise from the basement and he starts to his feet, but Stiles immediately starts cursing and Peter determines that Stiles had just stubbed his toe. He still stays standing. “The house apparently has some degree of intelligence, including a sense of pride in its condition, and it was suggested that improving that might earn some goodwill.”

“Right. And then it tried to eat you _again_ ,” Derek says.

“It didn’t—that was the first time it tried that. Before it was just incessant rat noises and involuntary relocation,” Peter says. “Derek, if you’d like to be useful, I suggest you demonstrate it soon, or else I really don’t see the purpose of having you here.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” Derek says, looking up. He regards Peter with a mixture of continuing confusion, resentment, and oddly, a tinge of resignation. Then he holds up his hands and gets up from the couch. “Fine. You’re you. At least the house hasn’t possessed you.”

Peter opens his mouth to retort that if it did, he certainly wouldn’t be bothering to attack himself. Then he stiffens. He looks at Derek, who looks back with the same alarmed expression.

“All right, that’s done,” Stiles says just then, coming back into the room. He drops his book and bag off to the side and dusts his hands off, a look of great satisfaction on his face. Then he sees them and he frowns. “Or…”

“Does the house ever possess people?” Derek asks.

Stiles’ brows jump slightly at Derek’s tone. He glances at Peter, who draws a breath to explain, but then Stiles seems to catch on to the issue himself. “Oh. Um, so…not…really? I mean, not by Arkham’s usual standards. There have been historical incidents where people apparently channeled past dead residents, but it wasn’t possession so much as walking into a flashback and why, did that happen?”

“No,” Peter says.

“Well, not _yet_ ,” Derek says. He rubs at the side of his nose, then gives Peter an oddly concerned glance. Then he frowns and looks sharply at Stiles. “What do you mean, Arkham’s _usual_ standards? As in, there are places around here that do possess people?”

“It’s okay, the university puts out a list, just don’t fall asleep within a block of those addresses and you’ll be fine,” Stiles says, pulling out his phone and looking up something on it. “I can give you some charms, too, and…anyway, were you, uh, planning to stay long?”

Derek shrugs. Shoots Peter another glance, and this one is far warier, but still concerned. “Not really, but your house is trying to eat my uncle.”

“I know, okay?” Stiles says, his scent suddenly flushing with anger and guilty. He keeps scrolling on his phone but his grip has gone white-knuckled. “I know, and I’m pissed off too, and I—look, I like Peter, I’m not trying to murder the guy, it’s just in three years the house has never acted up this bad and I’m trying to figure it out and—”

“And I do think we were making progress,” Peter interrupts, as he slips over to stand beside Stiles. He lets his hand bump into Stiles’ hip, expecting the man’s flinch, and when Stiles gives him an apologetic glance, he smiles and smoothly brings his hand up to rest on the small of Stiles’ back. “This latest incident is mostly my fault for not doing my research, after all.”

Stiles relaxes and flashes Peter a thankful look. But then, before he’s even settled into the glance, he starts to frown. “No, it wasn’t. You had a nightmare first—it sent you a nightmare and really, you don’t need to put up with this, Peter. As soon as I find a hotel that won’t—um, that Derek’s okay with, I can get you both—”

“Wait, wait, Stiles,” Peter says, as the sour taste of panic starts to rise in the back of his throat. He’s losing his composure, he can hear how he sounds, and from the way Stiles is looking at him, it’s just firming up the other man’s belief that this isn’t working. “I don’t think—”

“I’m okay, I’ve lived there for three years and—and it’s still not going after me, it’s obviously going after you for some reason—” Stiles starts.

A low but increasingly grating noise cuts across them both. Stiles blinks rapidly at Peter, then turns uncertainly towards the source: Derek, pulling at his nose as if he thinks tearing it off just might cure his migraine. “Look,” he mutters. “Two questions. One, if Peter leaves—it’s a _question_ , not an order, Peter, just stop and let—I just want to know, would that stop the house from getting at him with things like dreams?”

Stiles opens his mouth. Holds it that way for a good second, and then suddenly reapplies himself to his phone. “Um, let me…I should check the lease riders, but…um, that’s—that’s a good question, actually.”

“Great, you do that,” Derek says flatly. “Question two. If it’s going to keep going after Peter anyway, shouldn’t we just put him where we can see him and get more clues about what’s causing it?”

“So…I don’t really like this whole idea of Peter as lab rat, but intellectually, I have to admit more data would help here,” Stiles says slowly. “But—”

“Stiles, I’m an informed, consenting adult, and what’s more, I have just as much interest in you in solving this problem,” Peter says. He follows it up with a pleading smile, leaning into Stiles with bowed head, doing his best to look so supplicant that the other man doesn’t notice how Peter is slowly sinking his toe-claws into the floor. “Please. We can help.”

“Besides, if we go with the hotel, then you’re not going to be there when I knock him out,” Derek says.

Peter rolls his eyes. But as he’s turning to give his nephew a pointer in persuasive speaking—namely, threats aren’t actually that—Stiles suddenly grabs his arm. Stiles is glowering at Derek and then, much to Peter’s delight, he actually tugs Peter over so he can reach up and wrap his hand around the back of Peter’s neck.

“You know there are nonviolent ways of bringing somebody out of a hallucination, right?” Stiles says. He presses his lips together, then lets out a sharp sigh. “Okay, you know what, you’re right. You guys stay put, we’ll throw up a bunch of extra wards, and in the morning I’ll call up Lydia and see where she is on her stuff.”

“Wait,” Derek says. “Lydia? As in—Peter, it’s a different person. Right?”

* * *

It’s relatively easy to integrate the extra wards into the existing ones on the bedroom, which takes care of Peter. However, extending them to the other rooms on the floor would take hours, and by then they’ll have to wake up anyway, and Peter’s already down one and a half nights of sleep. He’s not being entirely selfish; whatever’s wrong with the house, the solution is likely to involve a good deal of magic, and if both he and Stiles are sleep-deprived, their chances of successful execution go down.

Besides, the longer Stiles is up and mulling over things, the more fidgety the man gets, throwing worried glances at Peter, smelling of guilt, constantly coming up with questions about Peter’s comfort like whether Peter needs more water or another pillow. In other circumstances, Peter would hardly say no to the pampering, but in their current situation, he’s afraid that they’re signs Stiles doesn’t think Peter can keep up with him. So he wants the man to go to sleep to cut off all that pondering.

Which means that, since it’s the only room with the proper wards on it, Derek gets into bed with them. “Well, pack cuddles and all, it’s cool, I’ve been educated now and have an open mind,” Stiles says, patting Peter’s shoulder as the three of them shift awkwardly about on the mattress. “Scott talked it all out with me and even helped me practice cuddle.”

Peter does his damnedest to not growl. McCall is absolutely no threat to him, seeing as Scott will never have eyes for anybody but the Argent girl, and damn it, but Peter is going to have _words_ with his niece’s pack about not telling him about that sort of thing. And if they have the temerity to tell him they didn’t know either, he’s going to have some choice words about incompetent spying. “It’s temporary anyway,” he mutters for now.

Derek, sensibly, says nothing. In fact, he makes very much like a dead body till Stiles finally drifts off, and then continues in that vein for several additional minutes. It’s long enough that Peter almost starts to think of sleep himself.

“You’re between me and him, what the hell could I do?” Derek suddenly grumbles. He twitches his legs, stops as Peter hisses at him—Stiles is only just asleep, and hitches up, then slumps back against Peter, breath whistling through his nose—and then lets out an aggravated grunt. “Peter. My legs are numb. Also, this wasn’t even my idea.”

“Well, it was your idea to drive down here,” Peter snaps, very quietly. He scrunches the pillow more about Stiles’ head to block out their conversation, then twists around to glare at his nephew. “And, I’ll note, you are voluntarily staying over. You even manipulated the conversation to secure that, Derek, which makes me question whether _you’re_ yourself.”

“Yeah, well, you might be you, but you’re denning,” Derek says.

Very matter-of-factly, but as Peter stiffens and remains silent, Derek’s composure cracks. His eyes widen and then his shoulders jerk as if he’s going to bolt out of the bed. Peter rumbles a subvocal warning at him and Derek catches himself in time, but still looks as if he’s suddenly discovered Peter does, in fact, have interests besides their family.

“You actually are,” Derek eventually hisses. “You’re denning and you got so nuts about it that you’re letting a house eat you—”

“I am not letting it eat me, I’m trying damned hard not to let that happen, and would you just shut up?” Peter hisses back. “What part of it is your business, anyway? Did you think I was just going to mold over in our house?”

“More like fill up the basement floor with dead bodies till Chris lost his temper,” Derek mutters. He settles back down, but he still looks disturbed. He keeps bobbing his head at odd angles, and eventually Peter realizes that he’s trying to look past Peter at Stiles. “And you had to find a guy with the one house that’s cursed even worse.”

Peter closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before his fangs can descend. And just then…just then Stiles turns over, flopping across Peter’s arm as his back and ass press into Peter’s side, a drowsy, contented noise coming from him.

“Do you have a point, Derek?” Peter says. He listens to the slow, measured beat of Stiles’ heart. “Or are you just enjoying the fact that for once you’re not the one with poor judgment?”

“I never said that,” Derek says, sounding resentful, as if it’s Peter’s fault he could find an insult in a bucket of sunshine. He moves his legs again, and then pulls his pillow out from under his head to drop over his face. “I’m the formerly possessed guy who’s sleeping in a homicidal house in the same bed as his psycho uncle and somebody who thinks studying evil alien squids is fun.” 

“Are you trying to make me feel better?” Peter asks after a second. “Or just feeling sorry for yourself again?”

Derek shoves the pillow harder against his face, then yanks it off and stuffs it between the top of his head and the headboard. “You want me to answer that based on how I feel now, or before you said that?”

Peter starts to clarify, and then he stops himself. Suddenly he’s far too tired for this kind of sniping—too tired, and, as Stiles’ slight wheezing at his side reminds him, actually in possession of a choice about what to do about it. “For the record, Derek, I’m willing to pay to send you home. I’ll even make up something to tell Laura, if that’s the problem.”

“I don’t need you to deal with her for me. If I wanted to go home, I’d go home,” Derek says sharply. Enough so that Peter takes another look at him, and finds him staring sullenly at the ceiling. Then Derek lifts his hand and rubs it slowly over his face, digging in deep around the eyes with his fingertips. “Look, if you really want me to leave, then say so.”

A few minutes pass. Peter comes very close to falling asleep, but there’s just that one nagging part of his brain that won’t quite stop, and finally he sighs. “Did you actually drive all the way here just because I sounded different on the phone?”

“Peter, you’re psycho already. Nobody needs haunted houses or whatever making that worse,” Derek says. He rubs at his face some more, then drops his hand to his chest. He still looks irritated, but it’s relaxed into something closer to resignation. “Anyway, you’re family, psycho as you are. And what, did you want me to call Laura instead?”

“No,” Peter says. He hesitates, and then bites back another sigh as Stiles twitches and unconsciously brushes his fingers across the underside of Peter’s wrist. “I do appreciate that, by the way.”

“Great,” Derek says after a second. “So, Lydia. Really, Peter?”

Peter grimaces. “Well, yes. She does appear to be the closest thing he has to a friendly colleague, Derek.”

“Shit,” Derek mutters. “Next time I’m staying in New York, I swear.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brichester is from Ramsey Campbell's contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos.
> 
>  _The King in Yellow_ , yet another tome that drives readers mad, is from Robert W. Chambers' stories, which were retconned into the Cthulhu Mythos.
> 
> If there hasn't been a Cthulhu Mythos story about frats/sororities, there should be. Secret Fraternity of the Cephalopod, anybody?
> 
> Since Stiles wasn't living in Beacon Hills at the time of the Nogitsune, Derek ended up being its victim instead.


	6. Chapter 6

Once they return to Chris’ house, John stops inserting himself into the man’s life and forces himself to sit down and log in and actually deal with his backlog.

Nothing in there is serious, in the sense that a catastrophic event is looming, but it’s not pretty either. Within the first five emails, John is already regretting his feeling of responsibility, and then he starts returning calls.

The downside of going out of town is that John has less access to his staff, and so he can’t use them to buffer him as much. Way, way back, in his life before Miskatonic, he’d been a proud hater of many-layered bureaucracies, resenting the way they slowed down everything and kept him from doing as much as he thought he could. He still hates red tape, but as far as layers go, he’s learned the wisdom of having a few between him and the idiots on top, who never seem to think through the practical issues before they go and promise the moon to their funding sources. Or, in this case, implementing new genetic-manipulation techniques before checking whether Miskatonic’s existing facilities actually can contain the resulting hybrids.

“You know that’s nonalcoholic, right?” Melissa says, leaning in the doorway just as John gulps at a newly-opened bottle. She raises her hand, pauses, and then curls it slowly down as John swallows, gags, and then coughs roughly into his fist. “And made with real ginger. Those are the chunks at the bottom.”

“Right,” John says, still a little hoarse. He holds up the bottle and swirls it, seeing the darker spots through the greenish glass. Then he sighs and puts the bottle down and slumps back from his laptop. “Yeah, it just figures…Chris was pretty busy down there, I just tried to get in and out so I wasn’t in his way and grabbed something…”

“It does look like the lager,” Melissa says. She tilts her head, looking at him, and then disappears into the hall.

John assumes that she doesn’t want to embarrass him further—or maybe just doesn’t like hanging out with proven slobs—and drags himself back to work, only to start when something clinks. He looks up and Melissa’s returned with what looks like a bottle of whiskey. She taps it against the jamb again, a sympathetic smile on her face, and then comes into the room.

“If he didn’t mention it, Chris always keeps a bottle of the good stuff under the bathroom sink,” Melissa explains. She moves around the desk and finds John’s half-empty water glass, then dumps it out in a plant pot sitting on the windowsill. “He _says_ it’s not for emergency medical treatment, because of course he knows alcohol just makes the bleeding worse, but I don’t know that I believe him. He can be old-fashioned sometimes.”

“Yeah. Yeah, well…” Somewhere, in some dimension, there’s a John who has a witty reply to that. But not this one.

“Normally my coroner side would also ask whether it’s a good idea to mix work and drinking, but from the way you look, your blood pressure’s up there anyway,” Melissa goes on after a second. She pours a couple fingers of whiskey into the glass, but instead of handing it to John, she comes over and pivots to lean against the desk, half-blocking his view of the laptop screen. “Also, Chris finished cooking twenty minutes ago. He can keep it warm for a little longer, but the sauce is going to get gluey, and if you think my cooking is good, you need to eat his pork chops.”

John starts to swear because he’s sure he missed Chris calling him, and then he just gives up and sighs. Reaches around Melissa and gives the keyboard a few taps that are more empty instinct than anything, and then he pushes himself up and puts the computer to sleep. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m coming—I guess whether I burst a vein now or after I eat doesn’t mean much to them…”

He stands up and she hands him the glass. Then swings in beside him, capping the bottle but keeping it high enough to be handy for another pour.

“Want to vent?” Melissa suggests.

“Didn’t you need to?” John says after a sip. It is good whiskey, and he has to hold himself back from just chugging it like it doesn’t deserve.

“Oh, I’ve still got complaints, but I had some decent meetings and managed to close two files today.” The stairs are a little narrow so Melissa drops back till they’re on the first floor again, but she comes right back up beside John. “You haven’t really gotten to see it, but I’m actually less frustrated than when I was working at the hospital. I get a say now, and sometimes I even set the agenda.”

As they come into the dining room, Chris pops out from the kitchen with a platter of gorgeous, juice-slicked chops. He nods at them and then slips back and forth, ferrying plates till John almost asks whether they’ve got other people coming over, because that kind of food can’t just be for the three of them. But then Chris sits down, shooting John a concerned look, and says, “I went with medium rare, but if you like it done more, I can just stick it back in the pan. I went up to ask, but…”

“I was probably chewing out a dean or something. Can’t blame you for not wanting to walk into that,” John mutters. He slices into his chop and has a bite, just so Chris will stop fretting, and then stops. He looks down at his plate, chewing more slowly. “Damn. I think that might be the best pork chop I’ve had in my life.”

Melissa sits back in her seat, looking very knowing, while across the table, Chris dips his head, a relieved smile on his face. 

“Yelling at deans?” Melissa says, beginning to cut up her chop. “That better or worse than yelling at underage drinkers?”

“Oh, worse, absolutely. At least with kids, you think they still have time to turn themselves around if you get through to them, but these people.” John prods at his chop. It doesn’t deserve that, he’s just mangling it, but God, a whole country between him and those idiots and he’s still fuming. “You know, I thought it’d get better once I got put in charge of the whole department, but…I just don’t understand. They’re all smarter than me, with degrees up the wazoo. You’d think they could read building specs.”

“Well, aren’t they required to listen to you?” Melissa says.

“Yeah, sure, but listening to me is one thing, doing what I say is another,” John mutters. He drinks some more whiskey, then tries to concentrate on how good the chop tastes. “Somedays I really think wrangling high schoolers on prom night is easier than herding academics. But look, I’m being a grump. You guys don’t want to hear this stuff, especially when I’m supposed to be fixing your Nemeton problem.”

Melissa and Chris look at each other. John’s not sure how he missed what was going on with the two of them before—the last time he was here, he had his team to supervise, and yeah, he wasn’t actually in Beacon Hills as much, but still, they have that way of playing off each other so instinctively that it should’ve been blindingly obvious.

Case in point, the way Melissa straightens up, sliding the whiskey bottle towards John, while Chris clears his throat to keep John more focused on him. “I know there’s work, but when people aren’t dying, we try to take a step back from that once in a while,” he says. “Burnout kills just as many hunters as carelessness—not that I’m saying you look like you’re—”

“Yeah, well, I probably do.” John sits back from his plate again, then shakes his head. He forgets about Melissa till he raises his glass and realizes there’s a bit more whiskey in it than there should be, and then…Chris does have a point. He’s probably not any good for working now, and anyway, back on the East Coast people are close to turning in for the night. “But it’s a good job. It’s just one of those days.”

“You say that a lot, that it’s a good job, but then you come out looking like you want to punch a wall,” Melissa says. She fiddles with her silverware, chewing at her lip. “I don’t want to sound like I’m prying, but really, John, are you doing all right?”

“I’m fine,” John immediately says. He can feel their skepticism but can’t bring himself to look up and meet it head-on, and instead just has more of the chop, and some of the green beans. “I’m just bitching. Like you said, nobody’s dead yet.”

Chris makes an amused noise, but he’s eyeing John a little, and then his gaze drops to the whiskey John is draining way too fast, as if that’s going to reassure the man who’s putting him up for the night. “Well, I don’t think I said it like _that_. Anyway—”

“Keep bitching. Get it out. Take it off your chest.” Melissa straightens up and pulls a mock-demanding face. “Come on, John. I’m not sure if we’ve said this before, but if not, we aren’t going to suddenly think you don’t know what you’re doing, just because you have complaints. We already had your team in once, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.” John makes himself put down the glass. There’s still some whiskey in it and he thinks that at least he’s not onto his second drink yet, and then he nearly rolls his eyes at himself. “Yeah. Yeah, you did, and you know, I should’ve known it hadn’t taken, if only because it went way smoother than anything back—”

Looking sympathetic, Melissa reaches out towards him. She seems to be going for his wrist or his hand, not his shoulder, and John starts—but then so does she as her phone goes off. “What…” she mutters, irritated.

“Is—” Chris starts to ask, and then his head goes up sharply, a beat before the doorbell rings. He presses his lips together, then pushes away from the table. “Sorry, John. Let me just get that.”

“It’s Jordan,” Melissa says, reading something on her phone. She reaches back over the top of her head and snags Chris’ arm as he goes behind her chair. Doesn’t hold him back, just gets his attention and then drops back into the frustrated scrunch of someone slowly being dragged back to work. “Tell him Deaton’s out monitoring things by the—where the tree used to be, and why didn’t he and Tara just call—oh, hell, just wait a second, I’m calling that uptight dick.”

Chris stops and watches her dial. The doorbell goes again and he glances over—the motion is just a tiny bit exaggerated, as if he’d just pulled back from an eye-roll—and then pulls out his own phone and calls somebody. “Jordan?” he says. “Yeah. Yeah, Melissa’s—no, I’ll drive her over, you don’t need to…listen, I _know_. I know. But the best thing is, you go back there and wait for us to show up, all right? Deaton’s not available, it’s just us.”

“No. No. _No_ , and I don’t want to hear—we don’t control the animals, David! This isn’t a Disney movie, just because some of us change shape doesn’t mean we commune with all of nature, and just go back into your office, sit tight, and we’ll be right over.” Then Melissa ends the call and slumps in her chair, phone clasped to the front of her chest. She raises a limp hand, then lets it fall as she blows out her breath.

“I guess I’m finishing this up on my own?” John says after a couple seconds. When the two of them look at him, they do it with such a blank look that John grimaces and wishes he’d just slunk off to the living room couch or somewhere out of the way like that. “Sorry. I’ll just…”

Melissa winces. Then pushes herself up, one hand up. “I hate to…but it’s that squirrel,” she says. She looks at John. “The one we think planted that last one?”

“Oh. Oh, right, so…somebody caught it?” John says.

“Well, there’s a squirrel at the police station and it’s got tentacles, so.” Chris shrugs as he stuffs his phone back into his pocket. Then he goes into the kitchen, stoops down, and opens one of the lower cabinets so he can take out what John _thinks_ is a kind of dart gun, but it’s got some oddly-shaped modifications. “They’ve got it cornered in one of the interrogation rooms. Doesn’t seem violent, just…”

“It has tentacles, and David is losing his mind and asking why can’t we exorcise it, and sometimes I wish that man would just make up his mind. Does he want to know what we do or not?” Melissa mutters, getting up. “I don’t think you have to come.”

“Would it go faster if I did?” John asks. “I know you guys don’t want the sheriff seeing me, but maybe I can just stay in the car and give you pointers over the phone.”

“I think I can get it,” Chris says, but he’s not looking at John, he’s looking at Melissa. He doesn’t seem…well, he doesn’t seem unsure, but he also doesn’t seem too enthusiastic either. “I helped grab some of those mutated water lilies in the store.”

“And the team had some nice things to say about you, but I’m just offering, is all,” John says, in as unpushy a tone as he can. He doesn’t want to make trouble for them, but on the other hand, staying out of a containment situation doesn’t feel natural to him—why he still sticks with his current job, more or less. “I don’t mind, and I’m gonna have to look at it anyway.”

Melissa looks at him, and then at Chris. Then at the table, a little longingly, and John’s still half-empty stomach does squirm at leaving behind that pork chop. But they’re both professionals, and in the end, she nods and John puts down his knife and fork.

“Whatever shuts him up the fastest probably will be the best for everybody,” she says. “All right, just duck when Chris tells you.”

“Done,” John says.

* * *

When they arrive at the station, there’s a gaggle of police officers standing around in the parking lot, shifting around with the aimless discomfort of people who haven’t been given any idea what they should be doing. The only ones who do seem to have any energy are Deputy Parrish and the sheriff, who are arguing with lots of windmilling arms. Behind and slightly to the side of those two are Scott and Allison, both of whom look as if they’d like to intervene in the argument; Allison’s fingering a taser, much to John’s amusement.

And her father’s embarrassment, though Chris limits that to a heavy sigh. “You probably want to get down now,” he whispers to John. “I’ll drop Melissa off—”

“So I can deal with that paper jockey,” Melissa says, jerking her head at the sheriff.

“—and then swing around to the other side. There’s another door closer to the room, and hopefully while they’re busy, you and me can get in and get the squirrel,” Chris finishes.

John is already out of his seat and kneeling on the floor, though he can’t quite get his knees past the big toolbox Chris has strapped in next to him. He wiggles around it and pokes his phone up over the edge of the window so he can get a scan of the outside of the building, checking for any other possible Cthulhic traces.

“I’ll get Scott and Allison to go play lookout for you,” Melissa says.

Then she gets out of the SUV. She’d arrived at Chris’ place in sensible flats, but now storms out in high heels that click so stridently the sheriff’s angry voice falters before she even starts talking. For a second John’s tempted to twist around and see if he can get video of _that_. And then he gets hold of himself, thinking that his son’s been a bad influence yet again. 

Chris drives them around to the side and parks, and then comes over to John’s side to get the door and get some weapons. He starts to offer John a gun, then clocks the holster John’s clipped to his belt and puts that away, getting out a reinforced pet carrier instead.

“So, how are we getting…oh, keys,” John says. “Those are always good, when you have them.”

“Technically, we don’t, but Jordan and Tara got tired of us calling them to let us in,” Chris shrugs, tucking the carrier under one arm.

“Here, let me see that a second.” John takes the carrier while Chris lets them in and checks over the warding work. He can already tell the carrier’s modeled after the containers his team brought and the wards are probably fine, but since the tests aren’t showing straight Great Old One traces, he adds a couple all-purpose eldritch-horror protections just in case.

The interrogation room is just off the entryway and when they peer through the window, the squirrel is sitting as calmly as you please right on top of the table, the grey, surprisingly fluffy-looking tentacles that make up its tail lazily uncurling and stretching up over its head.

“Cute,” Chris says, blinking. He tilts his head. “Kind of. Scott’s probably going to want to know if we can rehab and release.”

“Well, do we have to show it to him?” John asks.

Chris snorts, then ducks his head into one hand to stifle it. His eyes flick over and they’re warm with amusement, and for a second John…maybe should’ve not had the whiskey. Even if it wasn’t that much. 

Thankfully, Chris stays focused on the squirrel. While John’s struggling with stupid ideas he’s too old to be having, the other man puts the carrier down on the floor, opening the front and then pushing it so it won’t block the door from opening. Then he takes out his dart gun and two darts, which he holds out towards John. They’re Miskatonic-issue and John just mutters to check that they haven’t expired; when the ends glow green, he gives Chris a nod.

Chris loads the darts into the gun, adjusts a couple things, and then takes up a position flat against the wall on the other side of the door. He cranes his head around to glance through the window—squirrel is still oblivious—and then angles the gun along the edge of the door. Then reaches back and gets out his keyring and passes that to John.

“On three?” John asks.

“I can’t really see it from here, just go when you think I’ve got a good line on it,” Chris mutters. He sounds absentminded, but in the way of somebody who’s deliberately focused on something else.

John nods and sticks the key into the lock. The squirrel pricks up as the tumblers begin to fall into place, then drops forward onto one forepaw, the other held up and ready to scamper. All the tentacles in the tail go still so they almost disappear back into the fur—odd, John notes to himself. It’s like they’re just really bizarre extensions of the tail, reacting to the squirrel’s instincts instead of acting autonomously the way they would on a Great Old One, or even a first-gen hybrid.

Anyway, the squirrel eventually relaxes, and as soon as it’s back upright, John jerks the door open. Chris has the gun in and the first dart hits the squirrel high in the tail, while the other catches its back as it leaps towards the far wall.

The tentacles must weigh it down, because the squirrel doesn’t seem able to jump as far as it should be. It doesn’t clear the table, and when it tries to gather itself up for another jump, its feet twitch unevenly out from under it. Still, it’s pretty lively, scrabbling around on the table right up to when they come in and basically scoop it into the carrier.

“Maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t seem like it’s got that mouth the saplings had,” Chris says as he shuts the carrier.

“No, I was thinking that too,” John says. He squints at the squirrel, which appears to have given up the fight and is curling up in the back. “Well, guess you can tell Scott we’ll keep it alive at least till we’re sure about that. We’ve figured out how to freeze plants pretty reliably but animals sometimes still turn into goo on us.”

Chris looks a little exasperated, muttering something about the clinic better have the space because his garage doesn’t, but he just hefts the carrier under his arm. John gets the door for him—both of them, and then, since John still has the keys, he starts to open up the back of Chris’ SUV.

He does hear somebody coming over, but since Melissa is very audibly still yelling in the parking lot, John figures it’s Scott or Allison and doesn’t pay them much attention. Some stuff has shifted around in the back so John grabs a bag and stacks on top of the toolbox to make room, and then he turns to get the carrier from Chris and Chris suddenly attaches himself to John’s face.

John loses his balance, jams up against the back bumper, and then sits his ass hard down on the floor of the SUV. Still doing his damnedest to suck John’s tongue right out of his mouth, Chris climbs him like there are suckers on the man’s elbows and knees and—and honestly, as much as that says about what kind of influence Miskatonic’s been on John, it feels pretty good. It almost makes up for the sharp pain that goes through John’s back as they tilt over and Chris basically drags John into the car by the lips.

“Stay down,” Chris hisses, abruptly pulling off. He pushes himself up, then frowns as he catches on…the death-grip John has gotten on his hips at some point. Surprise flickers through Chris’ eyes and then he shrugs it off and twists around. “Got the squirrel, Dave.”

John can’t see the other man but he’s got the impression of a confused grunt, and then there come the sounds of running feet and panting. “Hey, um, Mom wants to talk to you again,” Scott says. “She’s coming over, and—and oh, is that the squirrel? Great! We’ll just get this out of your way, and—”

“And then hopefully, we can all get back to our lives, and you can stop bothering my dad on the one day his best friend’s in town,” Allison says. She sounds an awful lot like Melissa when she’s irritated.

“Best friend?” the sheriff says skeptically.

“Make up your mind already, would you? Either you want the details or you don’t,” Chris says, rolling his eyes.

The sheriff decides he does not, and walks off, saying something about just keeping it out of the news, he doesn’t want the crazies calling his press officer again. Chris leans up and puts his hand against the side of the SUV, watching the man go—also letting his coat block any view of John—and then sighs again.

“Sorry,” he says, looking down at John.

“’m okay,” John says. He pushes up on his elbows, then bites down as his back spasms again. It’s not so bad that he thinks he pulled anything, but he’s going to have to add some stretches to his morning warm-up. “There are worse ways to get shoved under the carpet.”

Chris looks relieved, and then sort of…his head tilts and he looks a little more closely at John, and it occurs to John that Chris is still sitting on him.

“Dad?” Allison says. With kind of a wary tone, the same way Stiles checks to see if John’s in the office when he thinks he might walk in on John stripping off after yet another goo-filled disaster. “So…did you two need to talk to Dr. Deaton, or can Scott and I drop off the squirrel for you?”

“I don’t think it’s scared of me,” Scott’s saying in the background, his voice just above a coo. “Hey, it’s got little tentacles for whiskers, too. Can I take a—can I show Stiles? He’s going to think this is so cool.”

“I think we’d better take that,” John mutters. He eases his legs up into the car and out from under Chris, then levers himself up against the toolbox. “Hey, Scott, sure, Stiles can see, but I should talk with Alan some, since we’re going to have to arrange special shipping and till then he’s going to have to take care of it.”

Scott’s head pops up over Chris’ shoulder. “Oh, so—so you’re not killing it right away?”

Chris looks at John, then flicks his eyes heavenward. Then he grabs the top of the car and backs out, making Scott move away. “Okay, okay, why don’t you just catch a ride?” he says. He gives John an apologetic glance. “Since I’m guessing you’re going to be the one actually feeding it. Unless your mom—”

“Oh. Oh, right,” Scott says. There’s a pause, and then he reappears with the carrier cradled in his arms, the grating tipped up towards his face. “No, she says she’s winding down with the sheriff. But Laura’s going to be here in two minutes, so she says go ahead and take Mr. Stilinski back, she’ll deal with her and then get her to drive.”

Chris looks at John, who shrugs; personally, he doesn’t get it, but if Scott’s going to show Stiles, he trusts that his son will talk Scott out of any misguided attempts to free the mutant squirrel. And they are going to need somebody who’s invested enough to deal with what will probably be a pretty revolting diet for the thing.

“Hop in,” Chris says.

Scott goes around front, followed by a tolerant-looking Allison, who pauses just long enough to mouth ‘I’ll talk to him’ to her dad. Chris looks a little dubious, but he just sighs a third time and then reaches out to offer John a hand up.

“Good?” he says.

“You _that_ worried?” John says without thinking. He catches himself, watching Chris watch him, and then tries to smile as reassuringly as he can. “Yeah, I’m good. Like I said, been worse. And I’m pretty okay with it _not_ being that way, for once.”

Chris relaxes a little, and then…it’s dark and John’s turning away, but he’s pretty sure the man just looked him over. “Good,” he says, slow, clearly thinking it over.

Well, damn it, now so is John.

* * *

John keeps meaning to ask if Deaton just lives somewhere in the clinic, considering the man doesn’t mind being called there at all hours. This time he forgets about it in between discussing care of the mutant squirrel with Deaton and Scott, and fending off his son’s frantic texts once Scott’s sent him a video clip. And then filling out the preliminary report to send to Miskatonic’s biology department, which he ends up doing on his damn phone because Stiles gets so excited he somehow tips off those guys and they call _John_ for it so he can’t wait till morning, or even till he gets back to Chris’ house and his laptop.

Anyway, John’s got his mind going off in a zillion different directions again, and so when he walks into a cart while looking at his phone and ends up tipping a jar of medical-grade dye onto Chris, it’s an accident. It really is. He’s pissed at himself and apologizes even after Chris starts sounding a little short in telling him it’s okay, he can stop, and that’s why, when they finally go back to Chris’ house, John offers to go in first and get bags out from under the kitchen sink to put over Chris’ feet and keep the man from leaving footprints everywhere.

That’s why. Because how the hell is he supposed to know that when he comes back to the garage, Chris is pretty much naked from the waist down?

“Oh, thanks,” Chris says. He takes the bags from John and bends over to put them on his feet, his stained jeans crumpled up in one hand—he’s still wearing boxers but they’re so damn tight over his ass that really, he might as well not be wearing them.

If he wasn’t, it might actually be better for John, since then John wouldn’t be having a thousand ideas of what’s under them, and at that point John just removes himself to the dining room, wondering when in the hell he turned back into a hormonal teenager.

The whiskey bottle is still on the table, and so is John’s glass. He’s being rude again, but he helps himself to two fingers. He’s drinking that off when his phone buzzes, and for once, he’s glad to check his email.

It turns out to be an email from the botany department, informing him that they’ve determined with ninety-five percent probability that the samples Deaton shipped out before John got to town have no active Cthulhic components in them. There’s residue, but you poke around anywhere on earth that has seen magical activity and you’ll find some of that. And while the lab’s still running tests to rule out the other five percent, in John’s experience, that’s just a formality. Great Old Ones don’t bother to be subtle because they don’t even know what that _is_ for people; they’re just as confused about human senses as humans are about theirs.

To tell the truth, John’s had a suspicion it’d turn out to be something like that for a while. It looked like Cthulhic, for sure, but it’s just never felt like it—those saplings didn’t leave behind any sense of pollution once they’d been uprooted, and that squirrel just was so—so quiet. Just acted like a squirrel with tentacles, and not like a small, furry avatar of a malicious evil whose bounds are beyond human conception. 

The whole thing feels like a fake-out, John thinks, and then he starts and looks at the botany results again.

“John?” Melissa calls.

“Yeah?” John says, distracted. He’s vaguely surprised to hear her, but can’t really remember why; he’s busy scrolling back through the results and cursing the tiny screen that keeps cutting off columns.

He gets the sense that Melissa slows down, and maybe gives him an odd look or two. “Well, I think the sheriff is finally settled. Laura wants to see the squirrel, but I put her off till the morning.”

“Oh, yeah, okay, great.” John turns his phone sideways to try and get in more of the table that way, then nearly drops the phone in frustration as that just loses him his place. He probably should just go upstairs and log in and open up the file on his laptop, but an idea that’s been sloshing around his head is finally coming together—but isn’t together yet, just coming together, and he doesn’t want to even move a step in case it plops back into the swamp. “Okay. Sounds good. Chris is in the garage if you’re looking for him.”

“Alan said there’d been some kind of accident…” Melissa says. She pauses, moves around a little, and then clears her throat. “John?”

“What? Yeah, he got spilled on, but he looks all right, I didn’t see anything bad and he took off his jeans so I think I got a good look,” John mutters. The row he wants finally comes up again and he maybe pumps his fist in triumph. Maybe. And if he does, it’s just a little. “Anyway, you can ask him if you want.”

Melissa hangs around another couple seconds, then finally walks off. Her footsteps slow down as she gets to the end of the room, but then pick up as she sighs. At that, John starts to look up, with the feeling that he’s doing something wrong…but he hits ‘send’ on the text he’d been writing to the botany lab manager as he does, and immediately gets a reply ping.

That drags his head back down and for the next few minutes, John’s engaged in a furious text discussion with at least one professor, probably two, and whichever grad student or lab tech they’ve shanghaied into manning the phone for them. John likes to think he’s pretty tech-literate, but after a certain point, like everything else in life, it ends up being a matter of sheer physical fitness, and his thumbs just aren’t what they used to be. He ends up sitting down to support his hands against the table, and then getting up again to get something cold for the growing ache in his points.

John gets the freezer drawer open with his foot, but he can’t get at the icepacks without using his hands. He thinks about it and shuts the freezer, and then elbows open the fridge, thinking he can pinch a beer bottle between his wrists, but—no, that’s not going to work, and the only way he keeps that bottle from shattering on the floor is to let go of the phone to grab it.

By the time John sets the bottle safely on the kitchen counter, he’s something like ten texts behind. Swearing under his breath, he starts scrolling up, but new texts keep loading and bouncing him back down, and…

Well, anyway, he gets enough to get that his guess is probably right, and now the academics just seem to be working out the theory and he probably should just screenshot everything and send it to Stiles for a layman’s translation anyway. He puts his phone on the counter and watches the texts pop up for a few seconds, rubbing his wrists against the bottle’s cold sides.

Then he remembers Melissa. And Chris. And he…well, shit.

John stands there for a second, eyeing the whiskey bottle across the room on the dining table. Then he sighs, and rubs his hand over his face, and just pulls himself up like the grown, completely socially graceless man he is. The least he could do is not steal more of Chris’ whiskey while he’s facing up to it, so he turns his back on the dining table as he walks out of there and down the hall and to the laundry room off the garage, where it sounds like Chris and Melissa are.

“Hey,” John calls out.

The two of them had been talking to each other. Too low for John to make out anything, but Chris had sounded frustrated, and Melissa like she was consoling him over something. Anyway, they go quiet when they hear him.

John winces, then forces himself to draw up to the slightly-open door. “Hey. Sorry. I probably came off—okay, look, I was rude as hell just now. Didn’t mean to be, I just think I might’ve figured it all out—”

As he’s talking, he’s pushing open the door, because he’s thinking he should just get this over with. He is not thinking about why the door might be shut, or whether he should give them a second, and clearly he should be, because Chris and Melissa are on opposite sides of the small room, teetering like people who’ve just recently sprang violently apart. Chris still isn’t wearing pants and Melissa’s blouse is hanging wide open, with dye stains on it.

“Shit,” John says. He starts to back out, and then thinks and grabs the door knob and yanks it shut. “Shit. Okay, so—so how about you come find me when you’re ready? No rush, it’s not going to be a fast fix anyway. I’ll just…I’ll go shower. Yeah.”

About ten minutes into what’s normally a five-minute shower, John thinks that he’s probably the only one who doesn’t need the shower. And then that this is the guest shower anyway, and trying to lend it to Chris would be stupid. And then…and then he gives up, and reaches down, and starts jerking himself off. Because yes, he’s stupid, and _yes_ , he needs a shower, and yes, goddamn it, he looked. At both of them. 

At least he’s got the damn squirrel figured out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't think Scott's reaction to the squirrel is realistic, let me just say that Cthulhu stuff can be downright adorable. I have a pair of amigurumi Cthulhu who say so.
> 
> I have heard that they've finally given the sheriff a first name (Noah? Blah), but I don't feel like find-replacing a whole story. So he's John till I'm done with this and then I guess I have to get used to...Noah. Blah.
> 
> Why, yes, I'm playing Stiles' dad as having a lesser form of the kind of nerd tunnel vision Stiles suffers from, which blinds him to obvious goings-on elsewhere.


	7. Chapter 7

They meet Lydia at the same coffeeshop as before. She shows up before them, mostly because Derek somehow managed to not remember to bring extra clothes when he decided to drop the hotel for driving over to Arkham, and then tore his shirt breaking into the basement. Stiles generously offers Derek a replacement. When Derek, staring warily at Peter, grudgingly accepts, Stiles blinks hard and then stares at Derek for long enough that Peter has to bump Stiles towards the closet.

“Huh,” Stiles says, still looking bemused, while Derek is busy changing in the bathroom. “So. Normally I’d shrug and refer myself to the authorities who talk about community property concepts in werewolf packs, but then again, it’s you.”

“Yes, and?” Peter says.

Stiles narrows his eyes. “And you might’ve almost gotten absorbed by my house last night, but it’s _you_ , and I know that’s not the kind of trauma that gets in the way of your scent-based possessive behavior. You’re not planning to sacrifice Derek to Lyds as some kind of weird peace offering, are you? Because one, she doesn’t really go for brunettes, even for her terror trophies, and two—”

“Of course not, he’s my nephew,” Peter scoffs. He sips at his coffee—Stiles was wary about using the coffeemaker, even after checking over the kitchen again, but Peter needs it if he’s not going to just snap and snap Lydia in two—and then, seeing how skeptical Stiles is, he puts the mug down and steps close to the other man. “I have other priorities, Stiles. _One_ , Derek needs clothing if he’s going out in public, or else we’ll have a circus as well as a house of terrors. Two, he needs clothing that won’t be missed if it gets destroyed, as it usually does on him—”

“Hey, you know, that could be my lucky shirt,” Stiles says, giving Peter a poke in the stomach. He starts to go on, then catches himself in a yawn. His hand comes up to cover his mouth, and then goes from there to Peter’s shoulder. “Okay, fine, I know better than to give Derek that, but you are such a selfish bastard, you know. Yeah, so it’s okay if my stuff gets shredded, because it’s cheap and also I know you’ve been trying to sneak trashier ones into my closet.”

Peter sighs as he retrieves his coffee. “Stiles, just because something has _marginal_ tailoring doesn’t mean it’s trashy.”

“Says the guy who brings the man-cleavage out for any kind of weather above freezing,” Stiles snorts. He reaches over and hooks his finger in the middle of Peter’s shirt-collar—which actually happens to be a scoop, not a v-neck—and then pulls down till his breath is puffing onto Peter’s bared breastbone. “That’s not trashy?”

“Not if you have the taste to do it right,” Peter says, letting the tug on his shirt tip him forward.

Stiles’ pupils are a little dilated, and Peter can smell the prickle of arousal going through his own scent, and for a moment—Derek bangs something, and they both recall they’re standing in a murderous house.

“Well, to clear your conscience, no, I do not mark my victims by making them wear your clothing,” Peter says dryly. He can’t bring himself to move back, even if the mood is dead; he’s too fond of the way Stiles leans into him. So he waits for Stiles to do it, and then resumes sipping his coffee. “Anyway, Derek knows better than to try anything silly with that.”

“Wow, a compliment for the family,” Stiles grins. He starts to take a step back and then jerks to a halt. His grin fades slightly as he grabs onto Peter’s arm, eyes flicking up for Peter’s reaction. When Peter doesn’t do anything, he walks them further into the living room and then bends over so he can move things in and out of his bookbag. “I gotta remember to mark that on the calendar. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any connection with the lunar phases.”

“Hardly,” Peter says. He pauses for a moment to consider the fact that Derek is obviously eavesdropping. “I suppose it doesn’t look like it, but I tolerate Derek better than his sisters.”

Stiles is still holding onto Peter’s arm. They seem to have fixed the involuntary teleportation problem for good, but last night rattled Stiles and all the flirting in the world can’t hide it. He keeps close to Peter in a way that should be merely flattering, but which instead is making Peter want to dig down and close things up around them, and then plant himself at the sole entrance so anything that wants to get in has to go through him first. It’s an extremely primitive instinct and completely ridiculous, seeing as burrowing _here_ obviously wouldn’t make them safer.

“No, I can kind of see that,” Stiles mutters, while he sorts through cases of attachments for his phone. “You complain about him a lot. You just never really want to bother with Laura or Cora.”

Peter hadn’t actually noticed that. He looks absently into his mug, trying to trawl through his own memory and see if he can confirm…and then he shakes himself, remembering the time. “He has his faults, but he’s always been willing to stick with his family. His sisters have had their lapses with that…”

He cuts himself off just before Derek comes out, scowl firmly in place, one hand tugging at the flannel. “Okay, can we get this over with?” Derek asks.

“Well, we were just waiting on you,” Stiles says, mildly enough. He zips up his bag and throws it over his shoulder, and then starts walking towards the hall door. “Also, it’s just plaid, Derek. It’s not going to devour your soul or give you a rash, I promise.”

Derek runs his finger inside the collar and then takes it out and looks at it. He’s not joking, and for a moment Peter thinks about loudly taking back everything he’s just said about Derek.

“Oh, my God, come on,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes. “At this rate Lydia’s going to get bored and leave and hack my computer so it’ll form a portal to Nyarlathotep’s court every time I log in.”

When they go out, Derek immediately heads for his car. He has the address, and he’s smelling surly enough that Peter decides it’s better to just give him that. But when Peter takes out his own car keys, Stiles stops him.

“So…aside from fronting for the nephew you actually kind of don’t mind…any side-effects from last night?” Stiles asks. His head dips awkwardly, and his eyes are nervously shifting about, but for all of that, his gaze always stays on some part of Peter’s face.

“Stiles, I can assure you that hiding how much I still think, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Derek could do better has been a life-long chore,” Peter says after a second. He flips his car keys so that he can wrap them in his palm, and thereby get the sharp edges safely away before he lifts his hand and tilts Stiles’ chin for a quick kiss. “Yesterday wasn’t pleasant, but I’ve had worse experiences.”

“Yeah, so, you say that,” Stiles mutters. Then he pushes back in, just brushing their lips. It’s a flutter, not a kiss, but it still leaves enough of a tingle on Peter’s mouth that Peter doesn’t notice Stiles raising his arm till after he’s cupped one hand over the back of Peter’s neck. “And given your past, I believe it, but still. I don’t want to be just ‘not as bad’, you know, I wanted—want to be good for you.”

His voice drops when he says that, drops and goes hard and fervent. Then he grimaces, bobbing his head up and down as if he’s afraid of how intense he’s being—afraid it might scare Peter.

Before the man can move away, Peter drops his head and presses his cheek roughly to the side of Stiles’ neck. “You are,” he says. “You are.”

Peter wishes he could be more eloquent. For another werewolf, the physical gesture would be more than enough, but for Stiles—the man does that to him, sometimes. Makes the words drop out of his mouth, makes him question tried-and-true approaches, suddenly seeing the glaring flaws in them. And he isn’t even angry, when Stiles does that.

“Okay, well…well, just, I’m glad you’re still sticking around, too,” Stiles says after a long second. He backs up but keeps his hand on Peter’s nape—he did get the meaning, and proves it by curling in his fingers and scraping them lightly down either side of Peter’s spine, where, if he was an alpha, his claws would go. Only after that does he let go, and move so that he’s not blocking Peter’s way to the car. “Even if it makes me feel guilty as hell for everything that’s happened to you.”

“I’ll remember that when we find the source of all of this,” Peter says. He smiles, and he can tell Stiles thinks he’s trying to lighten the mood. Which he is, but also, he’s promising the other man. “That is why we’ve involved Lydia, isn’t it?”

Stiles laughs. “Man, you _have_ worked with her. Okay, let’s go see what she’s got to say.”

Lydia greets them with the entire back of the coffeeshop unofficially dedicated to her, what with the multiple external drives and other blinking plastic boxes scattered about and the snaking wires back to her laptop. She’s also ordered Stiles and Peter the exact same thing they’d been having when they’d run into her before, and for Derek, she has a cup of black coffee, no sugar, and a giant slice of coffeecake.

“I also threatened the baristas with past life regression to the time of the Elder Things if they tried to give you their numbers,” she says to Derek, who’s suspiciously sniffing at the coffeecake.

Stiles blinks twice, then jabs his finger at her. “You _like_ him?”

Derek winces. Lydia rolls her eyes. “No, Stiles, I don’t _like_ him, I just appreciate that Derek is utterly predictable about the way he goes about intimidating somebody, right down to looming over the same shoulder.”

Derek jerks up, gives Peter a told-you-so glower, and then grudgingly moves from behind Lydia to the nearest seat. He drops into it and immediately shoves his legs into what feels like nearly all the space under the table, while still giving his coffeecake a wary side-eye. Which is why, despite his enhanced senses, he completely fails to detect Lydia’s impending stiletto to the foot before it’s too late.

Peter sighs and rescues his and Stiles’ mugs from the jumping table, and…then ends up retaining both of them as Lydia, disdainfully tossing her hair, flips around her laptop to show Stiles something that has him instantly mesmerized.

“Oh, wow, you got a lot done,” Stiles says, scrunching himself down to near-keyboard level as Lydia smugly taps away. Then he frowns. “Also, what the hell, I thought I had a pretty decent landlord—oh, so looks like the house isn’t just suffering a hangover from all the evil witches and wizards who’ve stayed there over the years. It actually has a whole separate problem on top of that.”

“Which wasn’t disclosed in the lease, I take it?” Peter says.

Stiles shakes his head. “Or by the leasing agent. Or, for that matter, in a known-supernatural contaminant waiver like you’re _supposed_ to do per local ordinance one-three-five—”

“But per ordinance two-seven-six, you don’t have to provide a waiver if you’ve gotten certification that the property has tested dormant for at least ten years,” Lydia says.

She and Stiles look at each other, and while Peter senses neither physical nor magical weapons being brought to bear, it’s close enough to an alpha standoff that he has to concentrate to not shift. He makes a note to himself to feel out what Stiles’ father’s opinion of Lydia is, and whether she might possibly be another area he and Peter would have in common, as far as how much distance should be between her and Stiles goes.

“So is it something we can kill or not?” Derek suddenly snaps. He’s spent the past few seconds doubled over in his chair, clutching at his foot, but now he levers himself back up with a bloody sock crumpled in his hand. When Peter looks at that, he rolls his eyes and then glowers at them all equally, shoving the sock into his pocket. “Do we have to do this every single time? Isn’t it painful enough to argue over whether we should lie to the neighbors or just scare them off?”

Stiles raises his brows, then turns to Peter. “That’s a standing argument?”

“Well, you use the gas leak excuse for every little incident and suddenly your town’s crawling with energy companies, wondering if there’s an untapped deposit,” Peter shrugs. “On the other hand, certain persons feel uncomfortable with traumatizing the uninformed, even if it’ll save their lives.”

“Fortunately enough, this town doesn’t pose that dilemma,” Lydia snorts, typing away. “It’s just a matter of filing for the right permits and then getting on the waitlist for a clearance and disposal team, which, given that Stiles’ father heads that team, shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Derek narrows his eyes, then straightens up and sucks his breath as if he means to ask something. However, Stiles beats him to it—though Stiles is chagrined, not skeptical, and squirms a bit under Lydia’s arched brow before he finally manages to get the words out. “Actually, so, um, Dad’s out of town…”

Lydia stops typing. She looks at the screen as if it’s suddenly flipped to show an alien landscape. Then she lifts one hand and very carefully tilts the screen out of the way so that she can look at Stiles. She still looks as if he’s an alien landscape.

“…and if I want to jump the line, I have to talk to him first about it,” Stiles goes on, turning to Peter. As he does, his tone goes from embarrassed to apologetic, and even a touch pleading. “I’m pretty sure he’ll be okay with it, you could’ve gotten really hurt back there so it counts as urgent, but he and I both try not to look like the legacy dickheads I complain about so much, so I can’t just waltz in and order a team around.”

“Or we could just do it ourselves,” Lydia says. Her confusion has faded to the point that, while she obviously still thinks something’s amiss with Stiles, she is equally obvious about contemplating how best to work that to her advantage. The expression on her face when she looks at him wouldn’t be out of place on a werewolf trailing prey.

“Yeah, no, not for something like this,” Stiles says. He seems to realize he’s behaving oddly, but covers it up badly with his awkward laugh and sudden jump to his feet. “I mean, if it was somewhere else, but Peter’s staying with me, and I just don’t want—look, I’m gonna call Dad right now. I really don’t think he’s going to make a big deal out of it, and Peter and I just got back into town anyway, it’d be a lot to do, and…and I’m gonna call. I’ll be right back.”

Since they’re taking up the entire back, Stiles walks into the short corridor that leads to the restrooms. Lydia looks after him, still with that air of speculative amusement. Then she glances at her laptop. “Just where is his father, do you know?”

Derek knows, and he has half of an impulse to answer her—probably so he can grumble about it being the crack of dawn in California and does Stiles _know_ , Peter, as if everyone shares his lack of morning cheer—but he pleasantly surprises Peter by checking with Peter first. And then quickly pulling his scowl up before Lydia catches on.

And _then_ he even earns Peter’s approval by grumpily slurping his coffee, and when that attracts her disgusted gaze, he jabs the mug in her direction so her eyes stay on it and not on Stiles, who is pacing in and out of the main room as his phone rings and rings. “Okay, so, at some point, you’re going to say what the hell this thing is, aren’t you?” Derek mutters.

Lydia presses her lips tightly together, drawing herself up with overwrought dignity behind the laptop. Then she pauses. She blinks and then a slow, dangerously pleased smile spreads over her face. “You’re welcome to just see for yourself,” she says, flipping the laptop around.

Predictably, the screen is filled with windows of incomprehensible…one of them is fast-scrolling code, as far as Peter can tell—he’s hardly tech-illiterate, but some of the characters aren’t from any language he’s ever seen. The others hold spreadsheets filled with numbers, with no discernable labeling, and then one window high up in the upper right-hand corner is displaying a floor layout of the house, with what at first glance appears to be a blob of yellow that constantly changes shape, size, and position within the layout. Eventually Peter realizes it’s supposed to be some sort of heat map.

“Really, Lydia,” he sighs. “It’s one thing to hold a genuine grudge. I respect that—of all people, I think I understand that particular urge quite well. But it’s another to resort to playground bullying simply because—”

“What are you doing with Stiles?” Lydia says, dropping the smile.

Peter looks at her, and her stare back is so flat and cold that when Derek shifts around in his chair, turning so he and Peter are mostly aligned, Peter can tell it’s pure instinct on the other man’s part. “I beg your pardon?” Peter says.

“Are you really that much of an idiot?” Lydia says, still perfectly chilling. She reaches out without looking and folds down her laptop screen. “Stiles’ father likes to take a morning jog, so between him running out of breath and Stiles’ rambling, we should have an extra few minutes to discuss this, but we don’t have forever and I’m skeptical as it is. I know you’re the worst kind of adrenaline junkie—”

“ _That_ would be my nephew you’re thinking of,” Peter says.

Derek starts up indignantly, but before he can say anything, Lydia laughs. Quietly, with the confidence of someone who not only has all the cards, but also knows which guns are loaded. “Oh, no, I think it’s you. You’re the one who always likes to test just how much leeway your family’s got for you, and now here you are, cozying up to Stiles, as if he’s just another pawn on your way to greatness—”

Peter snarls at her. He can feel the weight of fangs digging into his lower lip, and the prickling of the skin of his neck and the backs of his hands tells him the fur is coming out.

She doesn’t flinch. However, after a moment’s cold staring, she does raise her hand to wave down Derek, who’d bolted up in an apparent effort to block them from the view of the rest of the coffeeshop. “You’re fortunate this town has such a strong social prohibition against good Samaritans,” she says. “At best we’ll be reported to the university, and by then I’m sure Stiles will have cleared things up with his dad.”

“And you’re fortunate that he seems to hold you in such high regard,” Peter says, once he’s forced back his shift. There’s still a tight roughness in his voice, rather like the under-hum of an over-tensioned wire. “Frankly, I don’t see what business of yours it is, since your grant troubles hardly—”

“We’re friends,” Lydia says. She allows Peter to stew on that for a few seconds, then casually glances over her shoulder at Stiles. “Oh, he’s an idiot, of course he doesn’t think so. But we are. And so you?”

“He’s denning, that’s why he cares about the goddamn house,” Derek snaps. While carefully avoiding Peter’s gaze, even as he sits back down. The shoulder of his nearest Peter does start twitching, but irritatingly enough, Derek is otherwise proofed against Peter’s glaring. “So do you _really_ want to know more about that?”

Lydia’s expression undergoes a series of rapid shifts from blank incomprehension to skeptical understanding to, finally, a kind of outraged amusement. “Oh, _really_ ,” she says, glancing between him and Peter. “Denning.”

“I don’t intend to leave till Stiles asks me to,” Peter finally says. He tamps down on his temper enough to smile at Lydia; under the table, he keeps his claws out. He also starts sharpening them against each other, and is only mildly pleased when Derek’s heartbeat immediately begins to skip along with the sounds of that. “And for your own good, I suggest you don’t cause a situation where he’s forced to do so.”

“And for _your_ own good, I suggest you remember I didn’t leave town because I was scared of you or your family,” Lydia says, smiling back. She lifts one hand and flicks a few hairs out of her eye, then smooths them behind her ear. “Now, about how to kill this problem—”

“Finally. Jesus Christ,” Derek mutters.

“—we can’t. Because it’s not a living thing. It’s like a—think of it like DNA,” Lydia says, talking over Derek’s frustrated groan. “If you damage a piece of it, you’re raising the risk that those cells go cancerous, and even if the resulting tumor is removed, you’re still left with the damaged DNA. The land under that house is the same way, ever since the late 1600s when a black magic practitioner named Roulet first built on it.”

Peter straightens up. “Roulet? As in the Roulets of Caude?”

“Hey,” Stiles says, coming back over. He looks tense. “Hey, so I got hold of my dad—forgot about the time zones, but I think he was up anyway, so…oh, were you filling everybody in?”

“I’d just started,” Lydia says, with a smile that makes Derek shift uneasily, then poke Peter with his foot. “I was explaining that since you can’t really plug the ‘hole’ that lets the house soak up malevolent influences, you just have to keep draining it when it gets too powerful, and it appears as if this is one of those times.”

“Oh, yeah, pretty much.” Stiles checks that Peter’s following along, then retakes the seat next to Peter. “So that’s a bigger deal than just one person can handle, or even two people, so Dad said sure, we should get that handled ASAP since we’re kind of close to the center of town. But it’ll take a day to pull enough team members together, so for now I probably have to stay near the place so it doesn’t get too upset.”

“Why would it get upset?” Derek says. “Isn’t getting us out what it wants?”

Stiles makes a face. “Well, that’s the, um…it wants _you and Peter_ out.”

“But not you,” Peter says. When Stiles looks guiltily over, he smiles and puts his arm around the other man, and he absolutely means every bit of his reassurance. He’s not angry with Stiles at all. “The Roulets, since you appear to have completely forgotten your history, Derek, were a famous French line of werewolves. So it makes perfect sense that anything influenced by them would see us as a threat.”

“But—but you said this wasn’t a living thing,” Derek says, badly hiding his alarm as he glances at Lydia. “And it’s not a ghost thing either, because ghosts don’t come back when they’re exorcised.”

“No, it’s not. It’s just a break that lets in other influences,” Lydia says, looking very amused. “Although it wouldn’t be out of the question for the shape of the break to have an effect on how they look on this side.” 

Peter snorts. “Of course, of course. Well, under the circumstances, I think I have to change my mind. It would be safer if Derek and I took a hotel room.”

“Really?” Stiles says, with a deep huff of relief. “Oh, go—well, not good, I really hate this. I really do, Peter, but Dad says till the team goes through—and I’m getting really tired of seeing you get beaten around. But we’ll get this fixed and then you can come back, and it’ll all be cleared up for at least thirty years.”

“Per the data,” Lydia interjects, with a smug tap at her laptop.

Peter lets her go for the time being, and just looks at Stiles. “I agree. Now that we know the ultimate cause, I completely understand,” he says. “Let’s handle this the right way.”

* * *

“This is not the right way,” Derek says, several hours later, as he and Peter and Lydia stand in the house’s driveway. “Peter. Peter. Would you just stop and think for a second?”

“About what?” Peter snaps. “About the fact that an undead French werewolf who managed to get himself embedded into the land here is trying to _steal_ Stiles from me?”

“It’s not an undead werewolf!” Derek snaps back. “It’s not even a werewolf! It’s a house! That just _happens_ to think like a werewolf!”

Peter lifts his hands. Then puts them back at his sides. He takes a deep, deep breath, and then holds one hand out for the large lantern Lydia hands him. “And that changes things how…”

Derek puts his hand over his face. “Okay, fine. Think about the fact that we’re going behind the back of Stiles, who is a guy you want to _den_ with, to take advice from a woman who once tried to drug us to save _Jackson Whittemore_.”

“One, she tried to drug _you_ ,” Peter says, lifting the lantern. The heavy metal shielding around it makes it extremely unwieldy and he has to jerk his head back sharply to avoid catching his chin on it. He checks that there aren’t any cracks in the shielding, then sets it down at the end of the row he’s making on the driveway, and reaches for the next lantern. “Me, she just decoyed off. Two, we’re not going behind Stiles’ back. We told him we’d check into a hotel, and we did. We didn’t say that we were going to stay there the whole time he’s briefing his father’s team.”

A sharp, strangled noise makes its way past the hand. Then Derek yanks that off his face and out into a half-circle, spinning around so he can stomp down the driveway. He stops at the end, glowering over his shoulder. Then, shaking his head, he stomps back up. “I thought you liked him,” he says accusingly.

“I don’t like him.” Peter puts down the current lantern and then straightens up. He brushes off his hands, then seizes Derek by the front of Derek’s coat. “I want to make a den for him, Derek. More than that, I want it to be perfect and safe and never, _ever_ fail the way our house did. And I want him to like it, and that’s the only place where _like_ comes into this. And _this_ is the place he wants and if I have to rip its guts out to have it, I will.”

Derek had grabbed Peter’s wrists and he’s currently grinding them hard enough that Peter would have to break a bone to actually injure the man, but that’s far more subdued than he normally is. Peter might be able to plot circles around him, but when it comes down to sheer physicality, Peter’s never been quite sure he’d come out over his nephew.

“I meant—” Derek even appears to be fighting down his instinct to growl “—I was talking to _her_.”

Peter blinks. Then turns around in time to find Lydia looking equally surprised, though she quickly covers it up. “Stiles is my friend, so of course I like him,” she says to Derek. Her edge has softened somewhat, though she still looks dubious about them. “Do I understand his taste in men? No. But do I want him hurt, or to destroy his things? No. Now, I’m going to go down the street and deal with the circuit-breaker for this block, so do me a favor and settle your issues before I get back.”

“Issues?” Derek snaps, though she’s already walking away. He wrestles with Peter’s hands, then pushes himself back and drops out of Peter’s grips. “Issues. Right. Like we’re the ones who drove all the way down from Boston with experimental UV beams, just in case we found some werewolf dumb enough to talk into using them—oh. Wait.”

“Derek,” Peter says. Then he stops himself. He takes a breath, and reminds himself that deaths only feed the house. “Derek. Why are you _still_ here? And stop saying it’s because I’m your uncle. I know what we are to each other, and I don’t see Cora or Laura here.”

“Well, they’re smarter, like you all keep telling me,” Derek mutters. He carefully folds the lapels of his jacket so they’re facing the right way again, then brushes repeatedly at the fading ripples Peter’s fingers have left in them. “Because if you’re finally settling down and packing up again, I just—”

Then he stops. His eyes dart up at Peter and then away, and he hunches over as if he’s still the wary little boy who’d always go running back to his mother, rather than a full-grown beta who usually just needs to breathe to look intimidating. And, as he’s done ever since Derek was that boy, Peter bites back an irritated comment, holds it down till he stops feeling so damn _resentful_ of the way Derek can’t ever seem to relax around him, like family should, and just…sighs.

“I just…I don’t like being practically an omega, all right?” Derek suddenly adds. He looks off past Peter’s left shoulder. “And don’t tell me that’s my choice, okay? I know that. But—but look, you don’t like Beacon Hills any more than I do, and if you didn’t want to pack up, you wouldn’t be with Stiles, and…and I’m bad at that. You don’t have to tell me.”

Derek is rambling, Peter eventually realizes. It’s so rare that Derek doesn’t resort to grunts and glowers, let alone that he unburdens himself the way he is now, however inelegantly.

“And you were always the one who was going to be okay if they left, even on their own, and I’m not—I’m not asking you to teach me,” Derek says. “I’m just—if you’re going to be here, I just—well, and if the house eats you, I can’t really come over, can I.”

“Didn’t Erica and Boyd offer to come out more, and keep you company?” Peter says.

“Yeah, well, sure, _they_ would’ve had fun.” Derek snorts, then rubs his hand over the side of his head. “They’re still Laura’s pack. Besides, if I’d said yeah, then Laura would’ve known I wasn’t actually that big on New York, and you know her. And even if you don’t like me, I’m still family, so I thought—”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever said that,” Peter says. Then he and Derek both pause. “Well, even if I have, it was probably because you were driving me up the wall at the time. You just frustrate me so often, because unlike your sisters, I can actually see some room for change, but you never seem to agree.”

Derek snorts again, and the set of his shoulders seems to loosen up, even though he’s still not meeting Peter’s eyes. “That’s probably because you were so mad at me over Kate Argent, and then I just…I couldn’t think in that town, Peter. Even when I tried, something would show up to kill us.”

“That is true,” Peter says after a second. It’s been a while since he and Derek have spoken much about anything besides battle plans, he thinks. Derek had moved out to New York about the time that Melissa and the rest of them had finally gotten organized enough to be proactive and gain some breathing room, and after that Derek generally only came back for anniversaries, birthdays, and threats to the family. “So you think you could get along with Stiles enough to consider him pack?”

Derek looks sharply at him. “I was thinking that you’d just _tolerate_ me driving over once in a while,” Derek says.

“Because you really think that I wouldn’t notice you constantly sneaking up, on top of the eavesdropping,” Peter sighs. He looks over his nephew and admits that it’s been a long, long time since he really, truly blamed Derek for what’d happened to their family. They still scrap and snipe, but Derek’s covered his flanks enough times that he doesn’t even need to think to trust that to the man.

He raises his hand, and when Derek stares blankly at it, rolls his eyes and reaches over and pulls Derek up by the nape. When their chests bump, Derek’s stiff, but it’s Derek who bends his head first and presses his check against Peter’s neck. And when Peter does the same, Derek huffs so deeply in relief that Peter almost mistakes it for him losing his balance.

“Stiles is okay, once you tune out all the words,” Derek says. He’s certainly relaxed enough to smell amused when Peter growls a warning. “He’s less likely to get himself killed than Scott, anyway.”

“A domestic turkey has more self-preservation than McCall does,” Peter mutters.

Derek snorts. His cheek rises and falls against Peter’s neck, and then slides down till his chin nudges at Peter’s shoulder.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” he says. “Why can’t we tell Stiles again?”

Peter pushes Derek off of him, and then while the man is hissing at him, walks around Derek to pick up the nearest lantern. “Because it’s an immortal werewolf ghost, Derek,” Peter snaps. “It’s not going away, the best we can do is convince it that I’m stronger and _why_ do you force me to teach you things you should already know?”

“Because I’m stalling,” Derek says, just as a van comes screeching around the corner.

Before it’s fully rounded it, the side door comes flying open and Stiles jumps out. He promptly stumbles and nearly smacks face-first into the sidewalk, and when Peter—obviously, abandoning the lanterns to lunge across the lawn—catches him, his panicked yelp immediately flips to a triumphant ‘ha!’ as he winds all of his limbs around Peter.

“I knew it!” Stiles says, hauling himself up to hook his legs around Peter’s waist, as Peter straightens up. He goes on but he’s so out of breath that all that comes out are croaks that, even with his extravagant hand gestures, don’t make any sense. He makes a face and then his eyes widen and he abruptly slings his weight to the side; since he’s still clutching at Peter’s torso, this nearly sends both of them crashing to the ground. “I—I—I knew you were—were too okay—and then Derek ups and—and texts—”

“Whatever—whatever my nep—told you—” Peter grunts, doing his best to not lose his balance. He’s a werewolf, he can lift a car if he needs to—of course, a car stays still, whereas at his most active, Stiles is squirmier than a live octopus, with a grip twice as skittery. “I’m just—trying to—”

“Peter, I don’t even want to live here!” Stiles shouts.

They both stop fighting for a mom—fighting. Peter blinks twice, then shakes his head. Then he looks up at Stiles, who’s staring down at him with an expression that’s equal parts exasperation, affection, and…fear.

“I’m still—I still don’t even _know_ if I’m going to end up here,” he says, a little more softly but with no less force. He hikes himself up so he can take away one of the arms he has locked about Peter’s shoulders and scrub hard at his eyes. Then he drops his hand and resumes staring at Peter. “I haven’t made up my mind about where I want to go to grad school. You know that. We’ve only been talking about it for weeks.”

“I know,” Peter says. He tightens his grip on Stiles’ hips to stop the man from swaying. “I know. I’ve been listening. And that’s why…you hadn’t settled on anything, but you said the best positions are here—”

“Well, I mean, academically, but there are other factors and if staying here means you can’t stay with me—what, didn’t you think that mattered?” Stiles says. Then he stops. His eyes widen again, watching Peter, and then he lets out a disbelieving little laugh, even as his hand clenches sharply around Peter’s shoulder. “Oh, my God, Peter. I could go for second-best or whatever for graduate posts, it’s not like it’s the end of my career, and I want—I’m hoping—I really want you around a lot longer than grad school, and that’s why I was _talking_ to you about it in the first place, because of your family and you ended up wanting to leave Beacon Hills and I wanted to make sure you never felt that around me—”

“Stiles,” Peter says. His voice is thickening up on him. He feels Stiles shift in his arms and takes a hasty step back, thinking that the man is falling on him, and ends up having to sit down on the grass when his foot slips out from under him. Still, at no point does Stiles attempt to jump free; instead, his instinctive reaction is to curl down over Peter’s head, almost as if he’s going to cushion it with his own body. “Stiles. Stiles. I…it’s your house. You chose it, and I wanted—I want to stay, too. This is something I’m willing to put in the effort for, to make my place here.”

“This is some werewolf instinct thing I needed to look up yesterday, isn’t it?” Stiles says. He slides his legs down Peter till his knees hit the ground, but then levers himself up to catch Peter’s head between his hands. “Look, I—I don’t get it, but I’ll work on that, but at the same time, Peter, I do not want you _killing yourself_ for me. And UV lights that are experimental because they have a history of exploding? That’s not—”

“I thought you were leasing this place anyway,” Derek suddenly says. He’s facing the house, showing an unusual degree of sense in avoiding the death-glares Stiles and Peter both give him for the interruption. “Can’t you just rent somewhere in town that won’t try to kill us?”

“But this place is what works for you,” Peter says. He pauses, then tucks his head down; Stiles tugs on his nape, trying to get him to look up, but he ignores that. “At least, I thought it did. It’s…an instinct, yes, to want to secure it when you think you’ve finally found somewhere you can build your life. And I know—I’ve gone about this more from my view than yours. It’s just been a…a very long time, Stiles. A long time since I’ve even considered it, settling down.”

“Well, it’s kind of my first time, so I think we can absolutely shop around some,” Stiles says. He stops pulling on Peter’s neck and instead presses their foreheads together, craning himself down till they’re more or less level. “Yeah, look, even if I stay here, fuck this house. Derek’s right. It was okay for three years, but God, I’m not in love with _it_.”

Peter looks up. They’re so close that he can’t quite focus his eyes, but from what he can see, Stiles is smiling. He lifts his hand and brushes the knuckles against the side of Stiles’ neck and Stiles laughs and kisses him.

“I never have liked wasting resources on lost causes,” Peter says, smiling back. He tilts his head and lips at Stiles as the other man pulls away, then noses under the man’s chin and rests his face in the crook of Stiles’ throat. “Not my style, when there are so many other, far more productive uses you could be putting them towards. A lack of vermin, for example.”

“Or an actual city.” When they look over, Lydia is standing next to the row of lanterns. She picks one up and then rolls her eyes at the sharp, angry way Stiles is getting up and turning towards her. “Oh, my God, do you actually. They’re non-functional, Stiles, like I would ever give you another prototype after the symposium two years ago.”

Stiles falters. Then he jerks his head up, obviously realizing something. “That’s not even _your_ project,” he says, jabbing his finger at the lanterns. “Isn’t that—”

“That asshole McConnell’s work?” Lydia says. “Why, yes, because his grant was just canceled after the review board learned he’d been inflating his results for two semesters. So that money’s now in play, and it just so happens that I—”

“—have a hole in my budget, and an interest in giving me a reason to pack it in here and relocate to _your_ project, and Lyds, it is _not_ cool to put Peter’s life in danger just to advance your dissertation,” Stiles says. He steps back and grabs Peter’s shoulder. His chin goes up and stays up…but he does swallow a few times, looking at her, and then grimace. “Even if it’s objectively brilliant, it’s still not cool. Not cool.”

Lydia rolls her eyes again and then stoops down. When she straightens up again, she’s wearing some sort of backpack-shaped generator strapped to her back; the generator’s attached to a large, bulky-looking handle shaped like a hairdryer that she carries in her hand. “Oh, as if I wouldn’t come here with an _actual_ solution,” she says, pitching Stiles a plastic bag. “Now put these on while I sweep out the basement with the infrasonics.”

As she strides towards the house, Stiles opens up the bag and then pulls out three sets of industrial-grade ear protectors. He hands one to Peter and another to Derek, and keeps the third for himself.

“Yeah, so,” he says, looking at Peter. “Lyds.”

“I probably had that coming from her, to be honest,” Peter sighs. He fingers the ear protectors, then raises them over his head. “That said, I think we should have a fresh discussion about that project of hers before you sign on.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, with enough delight in his voice that Peter makes up. He grins down at Peter. “Yep. Definitely. All the talking, sure.”

Peter looks at him, and…Peter would have lived in the damned house. He would have made it work. So it’s all the sweeter, he thinks, that he won’t have to. And when they _do_ find a place, he will gladly lay down his life before Stiles ever has to give it up, for any reason.

He laughs and puts on the ear protectors. Then he gets up and goes to stand next to Stiles. It hasn’t been the pleasantest trip, but all in all, coming to Arkham has been worth every second.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Cthulhu Mythos, the Elder Things were an alien species that settled in Antarctica and built up an advanced civilization way before humans had even evolved to stand upright. See Lovecraft's _At the Mountains of Madness_.
> 
> Lydia's comment about good Samaritans - It says a lot about Lovecraft that normally, bystanders are far too freaked out to offer the protagonists any help, and just tend to watch from afar while whimpering, when they aren't actively trying to run away and leave the protagonist(s) to their doom.
> 
> Jacques Roulet was an alleged medieval French case of a man claiming to be a werewolf, although it seems that his contemporaries actually viewed him as more of a mental illness situation. Lovecraft didn't make him up, and did reference him in _The Shunned House_.
> 
> I might be kind of fond of the idea of Lydia as a much posher, one-woman _Ghostbusters_.


	8. Chapter 8

When John gets out of the shower, he towels himself off and goes into the bedroom, and he’s just picking up his sleeping sweats when there’s a knock on the door.

“John?” Melissa calls. “John, listen, can we—can I come in for a second?”

He nearly drops his clothes, jerking his head down and swearing under his breath. Then he yanks those back up and stuffs one foot into the sweats. Then pulls it back out, shaking his head at himself. He tosses the sweats aside and then dives into his bag to find clean clothes he can wear in company. “Give me a moment, I’ll be right out.”

“You don’t have to…well, all right,” Melissa says, with a resigned little twist at the end, as John throws open the door. She still has her hand raised to knock. “Listen, I just wanted to know that Chris and I aren’t—”

“Oh, yeah, he mentioned you were, uh, open. But I know better than to think that means you don’t want to keep it private, and I’m—I should’ve knocked, sorry about that,” John says. He retreats briefly into the room to grab his coat, but as he turns, his shirt-tails flap up on him. Because he hasn’t buttoned his shirt right, or tucked it into his jeans. “Not that it’s an excuse or anything, but I think I got your problem figured out.”

Melissa’s been trying to interrupt John the whole time, with increasingly irritated interjections, but at that she stops and looks interested. “Really?”

“Yeah, so, I don’t think it’s Cthulhic at all. We all got taken in by the looks of it, but that’s the whole point,” John says, wrestling with his shirt. His one hand’s still taken up with holding his coat, so he uses his other to stuff in the shirt-tails. Then he tosses his coat on and tries to properly button up his coat. “Alan and I need to talk it over, and I’ve got the Miskatonic people on it, too, but if I’m right, we should be able to tell by heading out to the preserve and checking on where the Nemeton used to be.”

“Where are we going?” Chris says. He has to have been lingering on the staircase, he pops up onto the second floor so suddenly. Looks a little regretful about startling John, but he’s deliberately holding onto both rails, taking up all the room so nobody can pass him. “What are we looking for?”

“It’s pretty late, too,” Melissa says, frowning and tucking one arm around herself. “If it’s an emergency, of course we’ll go anyway, but I just got the police settled down for the night, so—well, first of all, what do you think is going on?”

“It’s trying to mimic the Great Old Ones,” John says. He’s a little off-kilter because he’s distracted with cursing himself for completely forgetting about the hassle at the police station earlier. He just—he wants to solve this thing already. That’s the one thing he’s decent at, solving things, and if he can’t even do that, he just…he doesn’t know. “Your…your Nemeton…residue. I’m not sure what you call it, but Dea—the way Alan explains it, just because the Nemeton’s physically gone doesn’t mean you’ve lost it, right?”

Chris comes up to stand by Melissa. At some point he’s gotten sweats on, John belatedly notices—and then jerks his eyes back up—though he’s still got a little dye on his bare feet. “Yeah, the tree itself is just a focal point for all the magic swirling around this town. That’s why he keeps reminding us we’ve got to plant a new one, so we can get that under control.”

John snaps his fingers. “Exactly. That stuff was paying attention when Shub-Niggurath took out the old vessel. Oak tree couldn’t do it against a Great Old One, so when it starts looking for a new vessel, it’s thinking that it needs to be stronger so that never happens again. So where does it look for ideas?”

“At the thing that beat it?” Melissa says, with dawning comprehension in her eyes. Then she frowns again. “But it’s _not_ a Great Old One, and I thought it can’t ever be one—unless it’s trying to invite those things back here.”

“Which it’s not doing. It’s not that smart, it’s just copying what it saw before,” John says. He reaches into his pocket for his phone, only to realize that he’s left that in the room. “And that’s tentacles.”

Chris and Melissa look at each other. Melissa draws a slow, disbelieving breath, but she doesn’t look like she’s planning to argue with John; it’s more as if she just wants Chris to confirm that she’s not mishearing it. When he sighs and shrugs, she tucks both arms under her breasts and rolls her head back to stare at the ceiling.

“This town,” she says, shaking her head. “So this is—our new normal is a magical tree with tentacles, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Well, I think so. Nobody’s really sure how long the effect might last—maybe the new Nemeton will just drop the tentacle idea if we keep Cthulhic influences away from it for long enough,” John says. He goes back into the room for his phone, but gets turned around because he thinks he left it on the bedside dresser and it’s not there. Turns out it’s hiding behind his laptop screen. “Anyway, Miskatonic’s interested enough that they might want to declare the area a research zone. I told the professors to hold that up—they need to get board of regents approval for that anyway, and the regents always insist on local buy-in so somebody will be getting on the phone with you soon, but in the meantime there really doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger. Things are just going to…look different.”

“No immediate danger as long as we can keep people off that area,” Chris mutters. He rubs at the side of his face, then pinches at the bridge of his nose. “Never mind the joggers, how long before Erica and Isaac start teasing the tentacles?”

“As long as it takes for them to raid the nearest pet store and buy those cat wands,” Melissa mutters back. “Huh. Well, okay, if it’s just the one spot, I guess we could…could make something up about forest restoration, and build a greenhouse over it or something like that?”

John picks up his phone and stuffs it into his coat pocket. Then he looks around for his shoes. “Miskatonic should at least offer to cost-share and every proposal comes with a security plan that will cover concerns like that—you can put up something temporary for now, though it’s not Cthulhic so I’m not really sure what specs to give you. I’ll have a talk with Alan but he’s probably going to be point on that, seeing as he’s the one who knows this kind of botany, and—”

“Where are you going?” Melissa says, now frowning at him.

“Out to the preserve?” John says after a moment. He picks up one shoe and tries to stuff it onto his foot, but his ability to stand one-legged isn’t what it used to be and he has to back up against the desk for support.

“Didn’t you just say it’s not an emergency?” Chris says. “We have surveillance up already.

John jams on his shoes and then takes a step forward, only to have to catch himself against the desk when it turns out that one shoe isn’t all the way on, it’s just that the back’s folded down over itself. He curses and bends down to grab his ankle and then straightens out his shoe. At least, he tries, but the damn thing slips out of his hand and then somersaults away from him. “Yeah, sure, okay, but—”

“If this is some misguided stab at giving Chris and me space, let me tell you, we can make that if we need it,” Melissa sighs. She walks into the room and snags John’s shoe before he can retrieve it, and then looks down at him over it. “We’re all mature adults, if there’s something the matter, we should be able to just discuss it.”

“Sure. And I’m not…it’s not like I’m just pretending to be okay with you two and how you manage your business, but inside I’m revolted.” John gestures in what’s supposed to be a reassuring way, but which just comes out awkward as hell, from the way Melissa stares at him. “I’m really not. Whatever you two want to do, I’m just—I’m just here for the tentacles, anyway.”

Melissa eyes him skeptically. “I think you need to relax,” she finally says, giving him a poke on the shoulder with his own shoe. “You’ve been jumpy ever since you touched down, and I swear, if you say one more time that it’s not your job that’s the problem, I’ll—I’ll—I’ll _eat_ this shoe.”

“We needed the help, but we also figured it’d be nice to be working with you again. This kind of thing is just so ridiculous, the best you can do sometimes is just make sure your company’s good,” Chris says, coming up. He slides his hands up over Melissa’s shoulders, doing some kind of swirl that cracks her exasperation and makes her smile, and then pulls them back down. “You know what, let me get the whiskey from downstairs.”

“Good idea,” Melissa says. And then her smile fades as she looks back at John. She jabs him with the shoe again. “I mean, really, would it kill you if you just stopped defending the school for two seconds and thought about yourself?”

John starts to argue, but it’s just habit, him perpetually on the watch for professors trying to duck safeguards or administrators cutting the wrong line items in the name of fiscal responsibility. The moment he actually hears what she’s saying, he…well, in all honesty, can’t argue.

What he can do is grab that damn shoe, because he’s starting to bruise and he’s old and creaky anyway. But once he has it, he just tosses it in his hand a couple times and then sets it aside. “Yeah, well, I think at this point, if I tried to think about me, I’d just end up getting too pissed off to do my job right.”

“You know, I started helping Scott because I was worried about him and nobody else seemed to be stepping up,” Melissa says after a moment. She comes a little further forward, till she can put one hand on his shoulder. “It turns out I’m pretty good at being a coroner, and also at wrangling werewolves. But aside from that, I really do care about this town, and I care about the people who live here. I think that’s what keeps me going, and not that I’m just really good at saving people.”

John looks up at her, then lets out a strangled little exhale. Most of it’s because his back is cramped up, and when he gives in and sits down on the floor to alleviate the stress on it, it just lashes out at him. But some of it is because he just—he’s even out of black humor, he thinks. “Does it make me a bad person that I don’t really think about my job as helping people anymore, I just think about it as one nuisance after another?”

“You’re not a sociopath, if that’s what you’re asking. Believe me, I’ve met enough of them to know,” Melissa says dryly. She squats down in front of him and moves her hand up from his shoulder to pat his cheek. “I think you’re just burned out. It happens, John. It’s not a reflection on who you are—well, unless you just keep digging in that hole, and then I have to tell you, from what I’ve seen, you’ve got way too much good to waste it like that.”

“Yeah. I—yeah, I guess I knew that,” John says after a moment. “I just kept thinking, once Stiles graduates…and then never bothered making a plan for when that happened. So now my kid’s out there and I’m…I think I’m stuck.”

“Well, you don’t have to be,” Melissa says. She keeps her hand against his cheek for another second. Then she drops it, but just for a second; she’s shifting onto her knees and needs that hand to keep her balance. As soon as she’s set, she gets her hand back up, and puts her other one on Jon’s shoulder, too. “Look, with everything I’ve seen, I know you could find something. Just right here, God, I could think of half a dozen positions where we could use somebody with your kind of background, starting with that sheriff—but obviously a town like this isn’t going to pay the kind of money you’re used to—”

“Trust me, the one thing about Miskatonic I’ve never complained about is the money. I don’t ever have to worry about that again,” John says. He sighs and pushes at his shoe. “Yeah, you’re right. I put in my dues, I can afford to just do what’s…what’s right for me, weird as that sounds.”

“Oh, I think you’ll get used to it quicker than you think. And Chris and I are happy to lend a hand, just so you know,” Melissa says, smiling at him. “We really do like you.”

“Yeah, I guess anything’s an improvement on your current sheriff,” John says.

He doesn’t mean it in a mean way, he’s just spitballing and she’d just mentioned the guy, but for some reason Melissa stiffens up. Then grimaces, lifting her hand to touch her forehead as if she’s just realized she’s left the gas on in her house, or some other mess-up.

“John, we—well, look, I’m not going to say I wasn’t fantasizing about it, because _God_ , but David’s just a—but that’s not why we asked you down. Or why we’ve been trying to get to know you better,” Melissa suddenly says, looking up. Her eyes are a little wide and she’s using a rushed, nervous tone. “We were hoping having connections at Miskatonic would give us more leverage to deal with him, but aside from that, we like you. I always liked you, honestly, and Chris thinks pretty—”

Sometimes John can be dense, he knows that. He can handle office politics—he doesn’t like it, but he can handle it—and sure, his job involves a lot of trying to read people and figure out how much of what they’re saying is lies, posturing, flattery, or truth. But all that stuff comes with work, and when it’s not work, he just…kind of gets lost. But he usually does manage to find his way through—maybe it’s not quick enough to save him the embarrassment, but he does.

“Have you two been hitting on me?” he says.

Melissa stops, her mouth still partly open. Then she closes that and sits back and has a good look at him. Behind her, in the doorway, Chris comes up with the whiskey bottle in one hand and three glasses in the other; Chris is obviously the kind of guy who always knows right down to cents owed where he stands in relation to everybody, with how he instantly sizes up everything, drops off two glasses on the bedside dresser and then pours the third one full and offers it to John.

“We didn’t really want to resort to that,” Melissa finally says, looking at that glass. “Mature adults and everything, and we _were_ hoping maybe you’d be interested in something besides the work here.”

“Okay,” Chris says, shrugging. He puts the glass down on the table with the others.

“Yeah, well, I…we were talking about burn-out, and I…I just…really?” John manages to choke out. “What, me?”

Melissa looks at him again. Then she picks up his shoe, tosses it over his shoulder—he thinks Chris catches it—and hauls herself up onto his lap and buries her hands in his hair. And gives him the kind of kiss where normally he’d check whether somebody accidentally opened a gate to the Dreamlands.

John feels like he’s falling. And then he realizes he actually _is_ falling, with his back sliding down the table-leg, and he throws out his arm, then wrenches it around to grab at the top of the table. He’d warn Melissa, too, except that when he opens his mouth, she dives right into it, and…well, the floor seems to be the safe option, what with his back.

Once he’s there, she just keeps climbing right over him, her hair wisping across his cheeks and jaw, little tickling sensations right next to the firm grip of her fingers. He groans and she sucks on his tongue, and the way she just presses down onto him, breasts rolling up into his hands, crotch wriggling down his front, warm through her thin clothing—it’s like the first time all over again, that kind of shock to his system. He shudders and she grins against his mouth, he can feel that, and—

Then she’s off. Still next to him, tossing her hair up and back, a dark silky mass around the sudden pale flash of her throat and he’s so busy looking at it that it takes the weight on his chest to make him realize Chris has taken her place.

John startles and glances at Melissa, but she’s busy stripping off her blouse. He looks back at Chris and Chris has already gone wary, though he’s still got his hands on John’s chest. “Hey,” Chris says.

“Yeah,” John says. He pushes himself up onto one arm; Chris twitches like he might get off, but then John raises one knee and bumps it into Chris’ back on purpose, and Chris settles back down. “So…”

“Well, so we figured maybe we’d take turns,” Chris says after another second of eyeing John. His hands move a little on John, kind of a circular motion, and then he bends the fingertips so they scratch as John sits up further, sending his hands sliding down to John’s belly. “Though I’ve been getting more of you, since Melissa was busy running interference—”

John reaches up towards Chris’ face. He still can’t quite believe this is happening, but Chris stops talking and bends down. Even crooks his head a little, matching up with how John can’t even hold his arm straight, and then John has him by the side of the jaw and they go back down against the floor, Chris rubbing up against him and making noises like there really is something about John to get him hot and bothered. And hot—he’s shucking off his sweats, and then he humps himself up to make a little space between them, and his hand palms John through John’s jeans and _Jesus_ , but it’s embarrassing how John almost goes off just then.

“I’m all right,” Melissa says. She’s laughing, and when John peers around Chris, he finds her draped over Chris’ back, one hand tucked into the collar of Chris’ shirt as he jerks open John’s fly. “You want to warm things up, I can watch.”

“You know, even— _fuck_ —even if this is about headhunting, fuck, but I don’t think I mind one bit,” John gasps. Chris has moved down to nuzzle at his jaw, stubble rasping before he goes and flats the spot with his tongue, and between that and the sight of Melissa spilling out of her rumpled-up bra, John’s shocked he can even string the words together. “Been so goddamn long since I even.”

Melissa stops laughing. She stares at John again, one hand absently roaming over Chris’ chest, tugging down his shirt-collar to give John the odd glimpse of smooth, lean muscle, flecked with pale hair. Then she suddenly pushes herself up against Chris, grabbing him by both shoulders and hauling him down John. “That is sad, John. I’m sorry, but it is, and—and you know what, just. Stop. _Thinking_. You’re going to ruin this otherwise, and trust me, the way he’s going to look in a second, you won’t want to do that.”

“Wha—” John starts, and then Chris deep-throats him.

John’s head thumps back, and for a second, he thinks his mind might just have detached, too, and gone shooting across outer space to the Mi-Go archives. But then…then something pushes up his head. Melissa, squirming up next to him, holding him up so he can watch as Chris works his cock in and out of tight-sucked lips. Chris is looking up at him too, God, preternaturally calm about the way he is blowing the hell out of John’s sanity, and yeah. No thinking.

Just smelling the sweet, warm hollow right in the center of Melissa’s breasts. Feeling her clench up around two of his fingers, her hair crushing up into his nose. Hell, laughing about rug-burn on the knees, with her muffling her giggles into his shoulder. And then watching her and Chris—watching the way Chris shakes as she spreads his ass on her fingers, four of them in there and for a second John thinks God, but she’ll get her whole hand in.

And Chris snorting, the way he does that, genuinely amused but also clinging to John’s shoulder for dear life as he guesses what John’s thinking and gasps that yeah, she’s done that before. How he goes shivering and pliant once he’s seated full onto John’s cock, but the moment Melissa starts pressing herself into his back, he swears and jerks and rolls his hips as if his life depends on it. The goddamn way he just fucking _rides_ John to John’s second orgasm that night, as if this is all they ever do, screwing around, and there are no such things as jobs and responsibilities, let alone middle age creeping up on you.

“I don’t know, you seem to be holding up all right,” Melissa says, poking at John’s not-quite-limp cock. She runs her fingertip up and down its length, then hums speculatively as it starts to flush. “I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but—”

“Side-effect of this lab accident two years ago,” John mutters. He doesn’t look at either of them—they’ve moved to the bed, sandwiching him, and he can’t bring himself to pull out so he lets them stare. “And so you know, it’s just that, nowhere else. Not my knees, my back, my goddamn trick elbow…not as useful as you’d think.”

“Well, licking doesn’t take a lot of effort,” Chris says. He even looks serious. “Just pass me a pillow, so I can put my chin on something.”

John opens and shuts his mouth a few times, while that dick of his gets further along towards a third round. Then he just—he has to look at Melissa. He has to. He can only turn off his mind for so long, and now that it’s going again, it’s just going over _everything_ with these two, right back to those first phone calls. “Look, I might be reading too much into things, but I just—is it me or does he—”

“Oh, no, that’s Chris,” Melissa says. Half-exasperated, half-affectionate, as she gives John a nod and then reaches over to brush her fingers against Chris’ cheek. “I was about three months in when I looked up and realized on top of saving my son, he’d done my dishes, my laundry, my cleaning, my shopping—he got me tampons and organized my shoes and upgraded my silencer all in the same night, and I thought God, I’d better get him into bed.”

Chris grins at them. His shoulders hunch up like he’s embarrassed, but when John looks closely, he doesn’t really see that in Chris’ eyes. “I _am_ a professional hunter,” Chris says in a mild tone. “It’s my job to know how to catch someone.”

“Though you were giving him fits,” Melissa says. She strokes Chris’ cheek again, then drops her arm across John’s chest and leans on it, looking down into his face. “He was starting to think you really just didn’t like us.”

“No, I do,” John says. He pauses, but…he’s being truthful, now that he’s thinking about it. He just never does think about those kinds of things. “I just…I gotta rethink some things about my life, clearly.”

“Well, we’d be happy to offer you somewhere to do that,” Melissa says. She smiles at him, then, almost bashfully, moves her gaze to where she’s petting his collarbone. “But if that doesn’t work for you—and you really should find something that does, John, you shouldn’t just make do when you don’t have to—”

“If you just want somebody to bounce ideas off of, we don’t mind that either,” Chris finishes. He levers himself up and stretches over John to kiss the back of Melissa’s shoulder. Then he turns his head and rests his cheek against her, looking at John over that shoulder. “Plenty of work in our line, but believe me, as the one with the family who’s been doing it the longest—there are never enough people you can talk to about it.”

“Yeah,” John says. He gets up on his elbow and looks at them both. Starts to lift his hand, thinks the better of it, and—then, as Melissa glances down at it, he changes his mind and picks it up again. Reaches out and flicks Melissa’s hair, then tucks it back behind her ear, letting his knuckles graze over Chris’ cheekbone as he does. “Yeah. So, this here, what if I’d like to do that again?”

“You mean sex?” Melissa says, tone turning mock-stern. “You know, John, I try to leave the dictator at work, but I do have one rule—if you can’t ask for it by name, you don’t get it.”

Chris laughs and then ducks behind Melissa. “It’s a lot more fun than it sounds,” he calls back.

“Yeah, okay, I can imagine,” John says. Looks them over again. “Okay, so if I’d like to really have you two taking turns on my cock, how about that?”

Melissa doesn’t say anything. She just looks at him—he wasn’t expecting that kind of reaction, but he doesn’t think much of it till Chris’ head pops back up and Chris is staring in surprise at her. John opens his mouth to apologize and that’s when Melissa twitches and drops her head, and John realizes she’s blushing.

“I think we could do that,” she says, bringing her chin back up again. She’s struggling very hard to stay calm. “And we _definitely_ have a lot of reconnecting to do, you and me.”

“Yeah, well, between that and getting Chris up to speed, I think that’s at least another trip out here,” John says. He lies back down and folds his arms behind his head, and then laughs as she gives his arm a smack. “HR is always nagging me about my unused days, come to think of it.”

“Well, if you’d like some suggestions…” Melissa says, smiling again.

“Want to hand me that pillow?” Chris asks.

The two of them look at each other, and…it makes John a little nervous, he’s not going to lie. But on the other hand, he’s not just curious about the result. He’s looking forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The one thing everybody seems to know about the Cthulhu Mythos is the tentacles, even though those really have very little to do with Cthulhu's power, or why in-universe he's so terrifying. Some writers do describe Cthulhu and similar entities as using their tentacles to touch people and make the mental connection that allows them to drive you insane that way, but touch isn't necessary in the original Lovecraft stories.


	9. Chapter 9

“He’s actually going to sleep out there,” Stiles says, standing at the window overlooking the driveway. He pushes his hand against his forehead, then turns to Peter. “He really is. I mean, sure, those leather seats feel like a shaved baby butt, but…”

Lydia’s solution was, of course, effective, and they now have a nice, quiet, subservient house. Not that they’ll be staying in it for long—Stiles sent his notice to his landlord and took mover and temporary storage quotes while Lydia was busy—but Peter is not unhappy to spend one more night in the place, if only so he can make it clear to the damned house that while he _won’t_ be making his den here, he could. First impressions are telling, but last impressions secure your legacy.

That said, Peter almost thinks a hotel would be worth it for not having to explain his nephew to Stiles, and not just because Derek constantly tests his temper. He and Stiles have sorted things out about denning and they’re stronger than ever, but—Peter wants to enjoy that, just for a second. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the other man, it’s just…he’s so rarely gotten to be in this sort of position, secure and comfortable with everything he wanted.

On the other hand, Derek really is being ridiculous. “For the record, it’s not because I’m angry at him.”

“No?” Stiles says, and then immediately tucks his arm around Peter. “I mean, hey, I’m sure you’re whatever you say you are, but…he did kind of sic me on you. Which personally, I’m happy about, but I can also see why that might just be _a little_ irritating.”

Peter smiles and leans into the other man. And then, as Derek wrenches himself around again in the backseat of that stylish but space-deficient car, he sighs. “Yes, well, I am going to remember that. But I also have to admit he was following proper pack behavior in getting you.”

“Saving a packmate from themselves?” Stiles guesses.

Peter nods grudgingly. “And now he thinks he’s still following pack rules, even though we had an entire conversation today about how the status quo there has changed.”

“And…I do not follow that one,” Stiles says. He squints out the window, then puts up his hand as Peter starts to explain. “Wait. Okay. So he obviously thinks you two are pack, but now he’s exiling himself to the car and you think that’s wrong because pack would come in, which means…pack is here, which means pack is also me so the house is pack territory? But he thinks I’m not pack so now the house isn’t okay for him? And what, I guess last night was an exception because pack, meaning us, was in danger, but danger’s over so exception is over?”

“More or less,” Peter says after a moment. He glances at Stiles, but aside from the near-frightening insight, the other man just looks curious. Not offended, not wary or worried—not disgusted by the idea either, even though he and Derek aren’t terribly friendly. “We’ve both been moving on from Laura, it seems, and…well, Derek’s not the easiest one to deal with, but werewolves are made to live in groups. Not that I’m not happy with you, Stiles—”

“I know, I know, your very own Miskatonic wonderboy to get possessive over,” Stiles says, squeezing Peter’s waist. He smiles at Peter and Peter can’t help but tip their foreheads together, just smelling him. Stiles reaches over and rubs at the back of Peter’s neck, then tugs at Peter’s shoulder to get his attention. “But look, I get it, werewolves have special needs, and…so maybe I wasn’t totally up on werewolves when we started, but I am now, and I’m still here, aren’t I? If I didn’t want a werewolf, I wouldn’t date one.”

Peter laughs quietly, then lets his head slip so that his cheek presses across Stiles’ cheek. He rests there a moment, then pulls back. “I know, and I appreciate it more than you would believe. But I know my nephew too.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad. He doesn’t like it when somebody tries to fuck with you, so even with all the ‘grr argh’ he’s got the right idea, as far as I’m concerned,” Stiles says, while making one of his adorably clumsy hand-puppets. “So come on, let’s go get him. He’s making my neck hurt just looking at him.”

Much to Peter’s surprise, Derek comes quietly from the car. Though it starts to make more sense when he’s silent through getting ready for bed, climbing into bed—even if the house has settled down, Stiles still wants everyone where the wards are strongest—and then lying in bed, so stiff that it’s by far the loudest thing about him.

Stiles finally sits up and glares at Derek. “I can _hear_ you straining over there,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t hear the rats, but I hear you, and it is painful, Derek. Come on. I’m human, I promise. I’m not going to eat you, and I’ll make Peter promise not to—”

“It’s not _that_ ,” Derek snaps, sitting up too. He rakes at his hair, then scowls into his knees. “It’s—look, I just haven’t…been in practice.”

“For pack cuddles?” Peter says.

Derek looks at him. Peter makes a face and silently curses Laura’s choice to bite a bunch of mouthy teenagers with a knack for coining earworm phrases.

“Yeah,” Derek eventually mutters, scrubbing at his head again. “It’s been a while. After the poss—I had pretty violent nightmares, nobody wanted to deal with that except Laura and Peter. And Peter was just smacking me awake all the time.”

“Well, it stopped them, didn’t it?” Peter says.

Derek moves his scowl to Peter, and ends up caught off-guard when Stiles sighs and decides to crawl over Peter towards him. 

“Okay, I’ll stop blaming you for the slap method of stopping a hallucination, clearly that’s a general family problem,” Stiles is muttering. He pauses, seeing how Derek’s tensed up, and then stops where he is, sitting on Peter’s nearer leg. Then he holds up his hands with the palms out. “So, idea. How about I rub your belly and get you relaxed, and when you’re drifting off, I promise I’ll jump back over so if you start thrashing around, worst you’ll do is knock me out of bed.”

Derek stares at him. “Rub my belly,” he repeats slowly, as if he needs to drag out each word to understand what Stiles is saying.

“Can’t hurt, right?” Stiles says. “It usually works with Peter.”

Peter…has a mixed initial reaction, he has to admit. His fingers twitch and he does think about pulling Stiles back. But then Derek looks at Peter and the man’s expression is so…so _amused_. Derek obviously thinks Peter’s been humoring Stiles this entire time, and has chosen an absolutely ridiculous thing for that, and Peter is _not_ still angry with his nephew for ratting him out to Stiles, but as he told Stiles: he remembers that sort of thing.

So Peter shrugs and Derek, still looking at Peter, shrugs and flicks up the bottom of his shirt for Stiles and it is worth every bit of jealousy to see Derek’s eyes suddenly widen and his shoulders jerk down towards the bed, then start moving in short, arching rotations.

Although…Peter’s somewhat less jealous than he was expecting, watching Stiles work his hands up and down Derek’s stomach. Stiles is starting to hum, his head tilted the way it does when he’s concentrating, with those long, clever fingers splayed out against his nephew’s flexing muscles, drawing out little shudders that ease all the way up to the tips of Derek’s eyelashes. And Peter doesn’t really mind. Which is odd. Very odd.

He’s still considering that when Stiles lets out a satisfied noise and climbs off the bed. “Well, I think that’ll do it,” he says, before turning to Peter. “Bathroom break, and then God, yes, pack cuddles.”

Stiles trots off and the bathroom door shuts behind him. Peter sniffs the air, then tugs the blanket up over himself and lies down.

“You _told_ him. You told him about it. That,” Derek suddenly says. He makes a limp motion with his hand. “The belly thing. You said we don’t talk about that with other _werewolves_ , let alone outsiders.”

“Mmm, no, he figured that out all on his own,” Peter says. No rat noises, no chance of the house trying to torture him, and the fragrance of Stiles’ pillow in his nose. Lovely, and he means that sincerely. “You should try it when he actually means for it to be arousing.”

Derek lets out a small, stifled noise, which could be worried or offended, and most likely is a mix of both. “What. Peter, you—what. What the _hell_ is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, just go to sleep, Derek,” Peter says, snuggling into his pillow. He hears the toilet flush and then the sink tap running, and reaches behind himself to flip up the blanket for Stiles. “Nobody’s doing anything now. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”

“You mean _you’ll_ figure it out. Just because I drove over doesn’t mean I’m going to do whatever you feel like,” Derek mutters. He shifts around a little, pulling at the blankets, but his heartbeat says he is, in fact, sleepy. “Look, just tell me we’re not living in this fucking town. It smells weird. Not just the house, the whole _town_ , Peter.”

“Go to sleep, Derek,” Peter says. He hears Stiles step out of the bathroom and smiles into his pillow, anticipating the other man’s weight at his back. And yes, his nephew on the other side, and even though it’s summer and Derek throws off heat like a furnace, Peter does think this could be something to get used to. “I’m working on it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Peter/Derek/Stiles was always the end-game, though in my initial idea for this story, Derek got into the mix a lot earlier, and the dynamic was more like Peter/Stiles deciding to incorporate Derek for his own good, so he'd stop ending up in homicidal relationships. But then I decided I wanted to look more at Peter's issues with adjusting to a stable relationship and it didn't make sense to throw Derek into that when Peter was having serious worries about how long he and Stiles were going to last. So there's just this bit of a hint at the end.


	10. Chapter 10

_“Dad, oh, my God, they were totally pulling stalking and circling maneuvers on you, how did you not see that?”_ Stiles screeches. _“They were feeding you into submission! And movies? Movies? Cult horror films? That’s a huge sign. Huge.”_

“Stiles,” John says, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.

 _“And how did—wait a second, I’m looping Scott in, just because—Scott! Scott, your mom, Chris, my dad, what the hell? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”_ Stiles cries.

 _“Wait, what happened? Are they okay? I just—but I just saw Mom and your dad,”_ comes Scott’s tinny but clearly worried voice.

To his credit, Stiles calms down. A little. Enough so that he’s not plain shrieking into the phone, as if he didn’t damn well go through puberty and rewrite Miskatonic’s manual on safely maintaining physical integrity while in the Dreamlands in the process. _“No, no, they’re fine, Scott, they’re not hurt or anything.”_ Pause. _“It’s just that your mom and Chris seduced my dad. And when I mean seduced, I mean dinner and a movie and even a backseat make-out. Old-school seduced. Everything but the flowers, but that’s just because they all got turned into tentacles. Not that that’s an excuse for us, Dad!”_

 _“Oh, for…I knew Dad was acting weird,”_ Allison’s voice suddenly floats in. From how she’s fading in and out, John guesses that she’s calling into Scott’s phone. _“He was drawing up all those layouts, but I thought he was trying to run a hunt behind your dad’s back. I knew I should’ve taken a closer look at those.”_

 _“I just thought they were trying to help him relax. Mom said he sounded stressed out and she was worried about it,”_ Scott says, sounding genuinely baffled.

Stiles makes some kind of…noise. It’s high-pitched and outraged, and ends in a garbling rush that maybe includes something about ‘relaxing, _hah_ ,’ and at that point John grudgingly decides the better course of action is not hanging up. “Son. Breathe.”

Of course his kid doesn’t, and instead tries to talk, and ends up gasping himself into temporary speechlessness. John suppresses a sigh. He loves Stiles, but sometimes the boy doesn’t have a speck of sense for all the libraries of knowledge in his head.

“Scott, Allison, I…was kind of hoping we’d do this talk in person, but anyway, I just wanted to let you two know that while I’m interested in your parents, I wasn’t—well, it’s kind of early to say—” John starts.

 _“Oh, no, I’m good so long as you don’t get Dad into more trouble than he already gets,”_ Allison says. _“He could use another hobby anyway, he’s running out of things to fix around here.”_

“Er. Okay,” John says, blinking. “I mean, thanks, that’s good to—”

 _“So you are better, right?”_ Scott suddenly breaks in. _“Mom really was wondering about your job. I didn’t know she also wanted…um, but she usually knows what she’s doing. So I’m fine, I just want her to be happy—and I hope you’re good, too?”_

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m—I’m all right,” John finally says. In the background, Stiles’ wheezing starts to slow down; there’s also a voice that starts off distant but is coming closer, asking whether he needs a chair, and it sounds like Peter. “Oh, speaking of, Stiles—before I forget, you’re still helping Lydia with her dissertation, right?”

Stiles coughs loudly, and then, in a very squeaky, wary voice: _“Because…”_

“Because it’s still in the preliminary stages and we haven’t even routed it internally, let alone told MIT, so don’t go off terrorizing the administrators, but Miskatonic might be looking to open a field lab out here, and I think her project would fit with it.” John pauses for the usual outburst but…he doesn’t get one. He listens hard but as far as he can tell, his son’s still breathing. “And—and it looks pretty involved, if they do, so there’s a good chance I’ll have to sit out on the West Coast for at least the first few months.”

 _“…Miskatonic’s gonna open a branch in Beacon Hills,”_ Stiles finally says. _“Dad. Is that what you’re saying?”_

“Well, probably more like we’ll make the San Francisco office bigger and commute out, but…I’ve been thinking I need to change things up at work anyway,” John says. “It’ll be a new challenge, and—”

Stiles hangs up on him. For a second John isn’t sure, but when he pulls his phone down to check, the screen says call ended.

He’s still staring at that when Stiles calls him back. _“Sorry about that, Dad, I dropped the phone,”_ Stiles gasps. He sounds excited, and also maybe like he’d been doing some more screeching during the gap. _“West Coast, fresh start, changing it up but keeping the good stuff from before, yep, I totally get it. Totally. San Francisco with easy access to and exit to Beacon Hills. Cool. I’m gonna tell Lyds right now, this is so perfect.”_

“Stiles, I just said it’s just the prelim—” John starts, but his son’s hung up on him again. And this time, John thinks, staring down at his phone, he’s pretty sure Stiles isn’t calling him back.

“John?” Melissa knocks at the door, then opens it and pokes her head into the bedroom. “Are you coming down for dinner?”

“Hmmm? Oh, yeah, just give me a sec,” John says, putting his phone on silent. Stiles probably can’t do too much damage; after all, they’re just talking about a possible office transfer. How much trouble could that be?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Well, I couldn't just keep calling him 'hey you,'" Scott says, just a touch defensively, as the squirrel plasters itself to the side of his head, little paws clutching the rim of his ear, warily peeping over that as its tail tentacles nervously coil up. "So I named him Quint."
> 
> "Like...Quint as in Quintesson?" Stiles says gleefully. When Scott nods, he crows triumphantly and puts up his hand for a high-five. "Okay, biologically wrong, but pop-culture perfect, Scotty."
> 
> So how annoyed is Lydia at having to go back to Beacon Hills? Very annoyed. And how embarrassed is Laura that her family's been replaced by a tentacled grey squirrel as the supernatural town mascot? Very. And how smug is Melissa about eventually getting John to permanently relocate to Beacon Hills? _So much_.


End file.
